Search the over 37 000 records from Maitland Cemetery .

When did it start?

The very first burial in Maitland Cemetery was on the 16 January 1886. With over 100 000 souls buried in this huge cemetery covering 100 hectares.

This graveyard is now nearing its capacity and needs to be retained as a haven of remembrance as well as a place where it is safe to walk around the rich heritage of the famous and not so famous people who have made the City of Cape Town what it is today.

A large proportion of bodies from the old Somerset Road Cemetery have been re-interred in Maitland Cemetery. Many of the headstones are laid out as paths, some put up against the wall and others lay buried under mounds of mole hills.

Maitland Cemetery Project

If you are interested in help Ancestry24 photograph every grave  or you want to find out more about the project please contact us. As part of their civic duty and preservation of National Heritage these headstones once photographed and tagged will be available to the public for free on the our gallery.

Bartholomew Dias

Over 1500 burials have been transcribed from these parish registers. The majority of the deceased persons were listed as living in Mossel Bay and the were given as “Aliwal”.

Surnames included are Arendse, Bayman, Cameron, Cunningham, Damons, Domingo, February, Frans, Hendriks, Isaacs, Jantjes, January, Karelse, Losper, Lukas, Maart, Malgas, Maori, Marais, Mathews, McBean, Meyer, Michaels, Muller, Olkers, Pamplin, Pickering, Pieterze, Roman, Roode, Smith, Tobias, Waites, Welkom, Wiggett and Williams just to mention a few.

Mossel Bay was one of the earliest towns visited in Southern African when Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape in 1487 in an attempt to find the sea route to the East. The town was orignally called Golfo dos Vaquerios meaning “bay of herdsmen) in Portuguese.

On 8 July 1601 another Dutch navigator, Paulus van Caerden, named the bay Mossel Bay, as, according to tradition, he could only find a bed of mussels with which to replenish his ship’s provisions. The present town was founded in 1848 and was named Aliwal in honour of the victory of Sir Harry Smith, Governor of the Cape Colony (1847-51), over the Sikhs at Aliwal in India on 28 Jan. 1846. This official name never became popular and, to avoid confusion with Aliwal North, the old name of Mossel Bay was restored.

Search our database of Christ Church Constantia Burials and find your ancestors.

These records have been photographed and transcribed by the Ancestry24 volunteers. If you would like to join our volunteers and help transcribe other  church records please email us now and help us

You should find correspondence between the plaintiff and the applicant on the grounds of their divorce. Children's names are generally not mentioned but their ages are. Normally you will also find a copy of the marriage certificate, and sometimes birth certificates of children to prove their paternity in this folder.

Old divorce cases dating back more than 30 years are available in the National Archives repository. These documents are called "illiquid cases" – generally a copy of the marriage certificate is included.

Newer divorce records are held at the Provincial Master of the Supreme Court, in the province where the divorce took place.

Divorces are also published in the Government Gazettes.