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Thread: Bulawayo birth

  1. #1
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    Default Bulawayo birth

    hi
    i hope someone can help me out here with a birth certificate for my father (deceased).

    My father (Robin Arthur Miles Edwards) was born in Bulawayo 1 March 1929.

    His Mother: Laura Matilda Edwards (Miles) DOB 13-01-1893 Wales.

    His Father: Arthur Edwards DOB 3-06-1892 Wales.

    Any help or advise would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks

  2. #2
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    Hi If you are looking in SA you will have a hard job as a lot of records where not kept they where destroyed at some point. Well had a question about this a few weeks ago and I spoke to my friend who is a genealogist out in SA and she says its very hard sometimes. When she looks she's had to go through every paper in a filing cabinet to look herself because you get no help. but we can help with most other places,

    sorry I'm not much help may someone else will come along to help

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    Thanks Sandy

    trying to find it is a nightmare, i was hoping that maybe his birth was registered in the UK but again i have no idea where to look.

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    Hello ACEdwards,

    Welcome to British-Genealogy.

    We don't get many requests for stuff on the African continent so I had to do a bit of googling. This seems to be the place
    https://www.rg.gov.zw/services/birth

    Pam
    Vulcan XH558 - “Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.”

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    National Identity Cards If I remember rightly my friend said you need these and a lot of people don't have them.

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    Quote Originally Posted by ACEdwards View Post
    Thanks Sandy

    trying to find it is a nightmare, i was hoping that maybe his birth was registered in the UK but again i have no idea where to look.
    If he wasn't born in the UK, then his birth can't be registered in the UK.
    I have allegedly checked the Overseas birth registrations, but found zilch.

    Pam
    Vulcan XH558 - “Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.”

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    This was the e-mail reply I had from my friend

    As for SA records ALL BMD's are only available from the Dept of Home Affairs and that dept of all the govt department is the WORST – you MUST pay a private researcher who can go to the Archives and maybe find what you need OR to know the church where the event took place and hope they still have records –the NAAIRS website may have Estate records, if the persons had fixed property – that will give the date of death or if they were involved in a court case you might be able to glean odd bits of information eg like where they were resident at the time. You can see some info on the NAAIRS site but you would need to buy the file to read anything of value. We got adoption papers from 1921 from the Cape Town Archives by a person going there, paying for the file to be drawn and photocopied – it was a very small amount of money and revealed tremendous amounts of information, including a correct birth cert from Scotland but that is a rare, rare case. That is the reason why so many people in South Africa whose grandparents came from England are not able to trace their English rellies because they have no idea which of the eg George Carter's on UK records is their grandfather, because their own parents do not have am SA marriage cert, lost or never received, but most likely because we have used ID books which state birth date (no place, no parents names) married, date and place (it was a sticky back paper that was pasted into our ID books by the Vicar at the signing of the register.. since the middle 1970's. My sister-in-law required birth certs for her two boys they all live in Australia since 1983, when she was on a visit she went to the hospital just outside Cape Town where the boys were born – it was a private hospital - and was shown into a filing room and told look in there, there were volumes on the floor, pages torn out so you don't have to pay for a photocopy we presume, very little was in any order, miraculously she found both her boys and had copies made and she offered to return the volumes to the filing room – it was declined!!!!! She was extremely lucky because her boys were 36 and 31 at that time. So as you can see Ancestry in SA is not a hobby for anyone unless like John and I our parents were from England and we have some first-hand knowledge of grandparents to be able search in UK. There is very, very little on Family Search and I did find some bapts for someone but the church location was completely wrong. I know that because the town they were bapt in is next to where I live and the location of the church was recorded by volunteers or got mixed up in the computer as Pretoria – some 50kms from us and in the early 1900's that would have been an impossible journey for a bapt when the local Anglican church was just a stone's throw away from the mine where the father worked so be very careful if you use any of their SA information. I tried to contact the mine but that has been taken over by locals and they have no records, and I quote …"all old paper is destroyed we have no use for that things"



    Having told you all that there is very little possibility of getting any useful info from anyone in SA unless you are prepared to pay big bucks… really sorry not to be able to of more help – this is a 4th world country now!!!! No that it was easier pre-1994 but it would have been a little easier.

    If one of the mods want to post it on the SA link you may do so.

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    thanks Pam.
    Going through Zimbabwe is a complete nightmare, nobody seems to want to help.

    i will keep trying

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    Why were they there? If it was military rather than immigration, it might be worth checking military BMDs at NAS.

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    Quote Originally Posted by ACEdwards View Post
    Going through Zimbabwe is a complete nightmare, nobody seems to want to help.

    i will keep trying
    you've probably seen this website but not found it useful ?

    https://www.lind.org.zw/genweb/addresses.htm

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