Familysearch has updated a collection that could be very helpful for all with South African Jewish heritage. That collection, South Africa, Western Cape, Deceased Estate Files, is a collection of death notices. The originals are kept at the offices of the Western Cape Archive in Cape Town, South Africa.This Historical Records Collection, has almost 500,000 records, which may contain very important family information. This includes the deceased name, the name of the spouse, birth dates, marriage dates and on some occassions, marriage records. The collectis name searchable to quite easy to use. By following the link above, a search box will appear.

The person I am looking for is Barnett Samuel Cohen, who is from the Province of Pretoria, South Africa. I believe he was born in the early 1920's. I enter that information into the search box and get the result for Barnett Samuel Cohen, born in 1921. Additionally, I also get the names of his parents and his wife.

In order to see the original documents, I click on the camera icon, which is on the far right of the results page. The original documents include some additional information. While the information on the results page lists his wife as Natalie Cohen, the original marriage certificate (shown below) lists  her maiden name as Natalie Janse Van Rensburg, born on 18th of May of 1923, in Parow, Cape, South Africa. They were married on 9 December 1948 in Cape Town.

Other documents included in the file also gave more valuable family information, such as th names of their children from his will (shown below). They are a daughter Rene and a son Manuel.

This is wonderful information for anyone to start building s family history.