South Australian unregistered deaths (CD)
This CD comprises of deaths reported in various media
but not located in the South Australian Registry of BDM
Indexes. It is a useful resource when a death known to have
occurred in South Australia cannot be found in the SA Deaths
Index.
Death details when known include:
name of deceased
age
occupation
address
date of death
place of death
cause of death
source of the information
any extracts from publications
While the system of Death Certificates and Burial Orders were
designed to account for all deaths, the size of the colony
and remote deaths made the system quite difficult to administer.
Clearly it was quite indecent to leave a body unburied in
the heat of summer while waiting for the arrival of someone
with the appropriate authority to authorise the burial. There
are examples in the records of police being notified of a
remote death by letter from a pastoralist. There are also
examples of police attending a remote burial and requiring
an exhumation to certify the death. Many wandering men lay
where they died for many years before being discovered.
There is no rule of thumb to determine if a deceased person’s
death was registered. There are examples of persons lost at
sea having their deaths registered when their body was never
recovered and others suffering the same fate not being registered.
Likewise some skeletons found in the outback were registered
and others not. Some accident victims, the subject of an inquest,
were registered and others not.
Just how many deaths were not registered is something of a
mystery. About 200 000 deaths were registered in South Australia
in the nineteenth century. I would be surprised if the unregistered
ones amounted to even 1% of that total, but if one of them
was the subject of your research, I am sure you would like
to know the details.
Order from Gould Genealogy
You can elect to lookup just one unregistered death without
buying the CD.
Go to the index. |
