NAAIRS — National Archives of South Africa
The South African archives index — estate files above all, which are the backbone of South African genealogy. An index; the file is ordered from the depot. TWO DATABASES SINCE THE 2026 MIGRATION AND ONLY ONE IS COMPLETE: NARSSA's own 'Using the Search Function' page states it is migrating more than 8.3 million entries from the old NAAIRS database to the new one, that the new 'fulltext search' WILL NOT DISPLAY ALL THE RECORDS IN THE SYSTEM, and that 'Search Old NAAIRS database' will provide a more complete search. Both are offered to the public side by side. A NIL FROM THE NEW DATABASE IS THEREFORE NOT A NIL, and any recorded NAAIRS negative should say which database answered and at what address.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.za/ ↗
Last checked 2026-09-29. Tell us if this has changed.
The ground it holds
Record regions whose registers are filed here, and for which years.
- 1806–1910 Cape Colony — THE TRAP. There is no general civil registration of births and deaths at the Cape until 1895, and it stays patchy after. Hunting for a birth certificate is hunting for something nobody wrote. What names a family instead is the ESTATE FILE — the Master of the Supreme Court's MOOC series, indexed on NAAIRS — together with the Dutch Reformed Church register and the death notice inside the estate file, which lists the parents and the children.
- 1910–1961 Union of South Africa
- 1961–2026 South Africa — Eastern Cape
This map knows NAAIRS — National Archives of South Africa covers ZA, but nobody has walked its catalogue into the shelf. That is a gap in this map, not a gap in the record. Help fill it →