RootsChat.Com

Have you searched the national database for South Africa?

http://www.national.archsrch.gov.za/sm300cv/smws/sm300dl

A quick look (unfortunately Susanna Smith does return a large number of possibles being a common name) shows a Susanna Smith Estate records in the 1950's as a mental patient and a whole lot of others.....

If you can identify a possible record from the index, it is possible to get researchers to obtain the estate files or copies of court records etc at very reasonable rates for most areas. Unfortunately, the Cape archives are a bit more difficult as their rules are more restrictive but it is possible.  Covid restrictions have closed most archives and services though at the moment.

Sorry it's taken so long but I did not want to clog up the forum with the full 13 page document and have been trying to resize it,  the document is here :

https://www.dhi.ac.uk/causepapers/causepaper.jsp?cause=CP.H.168A

I have attached the two pages preceding the extract I posted.  It has been a struggle to resize it sufficiently for the forum, I hope it is clear enough. 

It concerns a case brought about by a young man who claimed that Agnes / Ann had contracted to marry him but had married someone else instead, seeking to have her marriage to the other person annulled.  I wondered what the sentence might be.

Yes, it was working up until this week Monday at least- I thought perhaps outside of SA there was something blocking connection, but it seems there is a problem in SA as well?   

The new site has about 1.5 million more names than the NAAIRS site, which is no longer being updated, so is really a lot more useful, if it works, of course.   I wonder if the archive has actually noticed the new indexing website is unreachable.......

Dreadful isn't it?   I am keen to try to find whatever records they hold for my ancestors before everything shuts down forever.......

I don't think they unplug anything for hoovers anymore, the electricity infrastructure apparently shuts down randomly anyway as it has not been maintained for over 20 plus years now.  Probably killed the servers and no one has noticed...........

I have just checked as I have credits on Scotlands people and it is........born 8 Jun 1856 to Alexander and Mary Young.

Interestingly, Robert called two of his children Alexander - one was Robert Alexander and another son was Alexander Frank, known as Frank.  there is no other known Alexander in the lines of which I am aware, so it must have had great significance for him to do that.

Perhaps he adopted the name Robertson after being taken in by Will and Margery Stuart in Berwick - her maiden name was Robertson......this is such a puzzle. He seemed not to know his father, and the name YOUNG was so significant that his son registered it on his death certificate. Yetholm also mentioned on several census returns.