South African Graves
Further information
The database comprises the records of Australians in the Victims of Conflict database of the National Memorials Council (NMC) of South Africa. It serves as a record of burial places and locations of memorials of 557 individuals.
The NMC supplied the following background information:
"Our main source was from the Field Force Casualty List (FFCL) which was compiled just after the war. It contains the list of those fighting on the side of Britain who were killed, wounded, taken prisoner, etc., from October 1900 until the end of the war. We also used information from the registers of soldiers graves in the Cape, Free State and Transvaal provinces and from old files used by organisations that predated this office."
The data supplied by the NMC was arranged in the following fields: Surname, Initials, Rank, Unit, Force No, Place of Death, Date of Death, Cause, Buried, Previously Buried, Memorials.
The data may present some difficulties for family historians. Firstly, many records show variant spellings of surnames, of which some are clearly misreadings. We have tried to avoid problems by having the search function work on normalised surnames instead of the surname in the original record. The source of these names is P L Murray's Official records of the Australian military contingents to the war in South Africa, Melbourne, 1911 (see the Credits page). Secondly, information is often lacking for burials in Zimbabwe. Wherever possible, we have added relevant information in supplementary "notes". Finally, the place names given may be obsolete, be misspelled or be an Anglicised form of an Afrikaans name. Users may need to consult a gazetteer or a reference work on the geography of the war. In the 1980s many names in Zimbabwe were changed. Notably, for users of this database, Marandellas became Marondera and Umtali became Mutare and of course Rhodesia is Zimbabwe.
9 April 2002