NATIONAL HERITAGE DAY - 24 SEPTEMBER

It's National Heritage Day today, as well as Braai4Heritage Day. How can you help preserve South African heritage? Church records are one of the most important sources of information for family historians. South Africa has many old churches. Not all their records are well-preserved, and in most cases, many of the preserved records are not easy to access. Church archives are not centralised, with most of the records kept by individual churches, or where there are archives, these are not easily accessible to all. If you'd like to make a contribution to preserving these records and making them accessible, you can start by asking your local church whether their baptism, marriage and funeral registers are preserved and easily accessible. If they aren't, you can ask whether the church would like to have a digital copy made of their registers. This can be done for free and the church will received a digital copy for their own records. Volunteers are available to help with this work. Another important source of information for family historians, are cemetery or burial registers. These are usually maintained by the local authorities (municipalities). Again, they are not easily accessible to all. If you're interested in making sure that your local church and cemetery records are preserved and easily accessible, please contact me at ZAFamilyHistory@gmail.com for further details.