Lesotho

71 volumes catalogued here

The oldest 25 are listed. A researcher is nearly always reaching back, and the rest are one click away at the provider.

The level below «a collection covers this place»: which book, for which years, and the link that opens its images. From FamilySearch's own catalogue. Nobody here has opened any of them. You can, though — mark the pages you have searched on any row below and this browser will remember where you stopped.

National sources for South Africa, unverified

From Wikidata, CC0 — the national archive and the national library where the country has one. Nobody here has opened these. The link answered when it was asked and that is the whole of what this map knows about them. They are listed because a country with no named source at all is the worse answer: 199 of the 237 countries here had nothing but the worldwide services, which cover everywhere and therefore say nothing about anywhere.

• National Library of South Africa ↗ national library did not answer this checker

The sources for South Africa

National and regional sources that cover this ground whether or not anybody has walked it here — which makes them the answer, not the consolation, for a place with no volumes recorded on it.

• SANDF Documentation Centre (Department of Defence Archives), Pretoria Nobody has walked this one yet Pretoria, South Africa
  Holds the personnel files of former Union Defence Force, South African Defence Force and SANDF members, indexed by service number, identity number or date of birth, place of birth, unit and dates of service. A copy is requested in writing (Private Bag X289, Pretoria 0001); it does not send records electronically, so a postal or fax address must be in the request, and a copy of an identity document is asked for. Used by the Lerena archive on 16 October 2026: an email request for a grandfather's file, sent to an address that no current official page confirms (archive@dod.mil.za); no reply yet. Fees and the consent a descendant needs were not verified. The Department of Defence's own website (www.dod.mil.za) did not respond when tried on 16 October 2026, from this machine, over either http or https; the address is the department's published one, not a verified live page.
• NAAIRS — National Archives of South Africa An index only — no images Pretoria, 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. *** AND AS OF 11 OCTOBER 2026 THE COMPLETE ONE HAS AN ADDRESS AND A NAME: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.za/search/, the “NATIONAL ARCHIVAL INFORMATION SEARCH SYSTEM” (page title NarsaSearchPortal). *** NARSSA's own notice still carries the 8.3-million migration warning AND ENDS “To search the complete database please click on: Search NAAIRS Database”, WHOSE LINK IS THAT URL — so the “Search Old NAAIRS database” a reader goes looking for is this portal, not a separate legacy address. THE OLD SEARCH MANAGER ENDPOINT www.national.archsrch.gov.za/sm300cv/smws/sm300dl IS DEAD (503 over http, timeout over https) and naairs.htm is 404; the service has now moved twice in a month, so DATE EVERY NAAIRS NEGATIVE AND RECORD THE URL. HOW IT WORKS: free, no account, an Angular app covering ALL TWENTY REPOSITORIES — ECKAR, GEN (the Genealogical Society's gravestone data), HER, KAB, LAR, MAN, NAB, NAR, NCAR, NFVSA, NWAR, OVM, ROS, RSA (all of them at once), SAB, TAB, TBD, TBE, TBK, VAB — with a four-keyword Contains/AND/OR form and a year range. Underneath it POSTs JSON to /search-api/api/search as {repositoryCode, keywords:[{keyword, operator, matchType, enabled}], hasDigitalObject, startComparand, endComparand, sortBy, page, limit} and returns {total, results[], facets}. THREE TRAPS. (1) THE APP'S OWN ROUTES 404 IF TYPED DIRECTLY — there is no server-side fallback, so a deep link cannot be shared and the portal must be entered at /search/ with the repository then clicked. (2) A MULTI-WORD KEYWORD IS NOT A PHRASE: two surnames in one box returned more records than either alone. One surname per box. (3) Run a control: SMITH returns 47,936 and SCHMIDT 3,418 across RSA, so a zero from a working search looks nothing like a zero from a broken one.
• City of Cape Town — City Parks, cemeteries and burial registers Nobody has walked this one yet
  The municipality that HOLDS THE ORIGINAL burial registers for about forty Cape Town cemeteries, Maitland (Woltemade) among them — FamilySearch's Cape cemetery collection names it as the location of the originals. NO ONLINE RECORD SEARCH WAS FOUND: the cemetery pages advertise burials, cremations, exhumations and grave reservations, and list telephone numbers, with nothing said about historical registers or genealogy enquiries. So this is a WRITE-OR-TELEPHONE source, not a searchable one. WHAT IS ONLINE INSTEAD is FamilySearch collection 2790463, 'South Africa, Cape, Cemetery Records 1872-2011', about 41,900 images of these same registers, digitised from the City's own Cape Metro Cemetery Records — and REDACTED: the cause-of-death column is blacked out, so the City's own copy holds something the digitisation does not.
• The SAAF Forum (an unofficial South African Air Force website and forum) Nobody has walked this one yet Pretoria, South Africa
  An unofficial enthusiast site (its footer says so) with a forum, open to read and needing an account to post. A sticky thread in 'The SAAF!' points to the UK National Archives' AIR 54 squadron operations record books. Its contact page lists how to request a personnel record from the SANDF Documentation Centre and four private military researchers. Read by the Lerena archive on 16 October 2026; a post asking how to find a man in 12 Squadron is drafted and not yet made.
• eGGSA — Genealogical Society of South Africa Images, free, no account Cape Town, South Africa
  Volunteer photographs of South African gravestones and transcriptions of Dutch Reformed Church registers and newspaper notices. Free, and for the Cape before 1895 it is often the only index there is.
• Gazettes.Africa Images, free, no account Cape Town, South Africa
  Digitised government gazettes for 24 African countries, free and full-text searchable. A gazette is where a state prints the things it must announce — naturalisations, estate and insolvency notices, name changes, appointments — so it names ordinary people that no register indexes. The atlas held no gazette of any country before this one.
• Ancestor.co.za Nobody has walked this one yet
  A South African commercial document-retrieval service. It takes a request for a named estate or death notice, retrieves it from the archives and uploads a scan to the requester's account on its own site. Observed charging 70 ZAR per death notice in December 2023, with a stated turnaround of up to 21 days, and notifying by email on upload. It is a RETRIEVAL AGENT rather than an index: there is no public catalogue to search, so it answers a reference you already have and cannot tell you whether one exists. Added from the Booyzen archive, which found two of its own death notices delivered this way in January 2024 and never ingested.
• IdentityNumber.org Partly free, partly paid
  Transcribed South African death notices, with older marriage and baptism records, immigration records and British concentration camp records alongside them. A free tier exists behind a sign-up and the fuller tiers are paid, which is why this is filed mixed rather than paid. NOTE WHAT ELSE IT IS: the same site sells identity verification on LIVING people, and its upper tiers list home addresses and phone numbers. This atlas indexes where historical records are held and points at the record collections only; the people-search half is named here so nobody mistakes the listing for an endorsement of it.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about South Africa in particular — these reach most of the world, which includes here. They are listed after the local sources because a body that holds this ground's own paper is a better first stop than one that holds a little of everywhere's. Worth knowing they exist all the same.

• OldNews.com Nobody has walked this one yet
  Digitised historical newspapers, indexed by town. The CATALOGUE is harvested and published here — 38,151 papers in 6,450 towns across 75 countries, of which 5,968 towns join to a point on this map — because their robots.txt says Allow: /en/newspapers/* and the whole structure is in the URL. WHAT IT COSTS IS NOT KNOWN, and that is why this says unsurveyed rather than free or paid: the same robots.txt disallows /*/record and /*/search, so the pages that would answer it are the pages not to read. There is a log-in; whether an image is free behind it has not been established, and a colour on the map is a promise this cannot keep yet.
• Internet Archive Images, free, no account
  Full-text search across millions of digitised books, including parish histories, nobiliaries and local monographs that name ordinary people. THREE THINGS VERIFIED 2026-10-11 WHILE REBUILDING A FAMILY'S 18th-CENTURY LINE FROM IT. (1) SEARCH THE RAREST TOKEN, NOT THE SURNAME. A search on one unusual middle name returned 329 hits and pulled out a 1972 family memoir, a reference work of colonial governors, a Falklands bibliography, an 1866 genealogical query and two monthly Army Lists — none of which a surname search had ever surfaced, because the book was CATALOGUED UNDER A MANGLED FORM OF THE SURNAME. (2) THE FULL-TEXT SEARCH HAS A PLAIN JSON API, which the site's own search page calls and which returns highlighted snippets: /services/search/beta/page_production/?service_backend=fts&user_query=%22PHRASE%22&hits_per_page=100&page=1&aggregations=false. It needs an ordinary browser User-Agent AND an Accept header; without the Accept header the site answers some requests with a flat 404. (3) FOR ANY OUT-OF-COPYRIGHT ITEM THE WHOLE TEXT IS ONE FILE — archive.org/download/<identifier>/<identifier>_djvu.txt — so a whole volume can be searched locally rather than page by page. Four Army Lists of 1775-1783, about 400KB of text each, were downloaded and searched entire in under a minute; that is how an absence can be MEASURED, by counting what the volume does contain. IN-COPYRIGHT ITEMS ARE LENDING-RESTRICTED: the item page still shows the metadata and the LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS without borrowing, which was enough to recover a woman's missing middle name, but search-inside and the text need an account.
• Arolsen Archives Images, free, no account
  The former International Tracing Service. Concentration camp, forced labour and displaced-persons records for some seventeen and a half million people, free and fully indexed.
• Find a Grave Images, free, no account
  Volunteer-photographed headstones and cemetery indexes, worldwide, with very uneven coverage. Owned by Ancestry but free to read.
• WikiTree Images, free, no account
  A free, single shared tree with an unusually strong sourcing culture. Not a record source.
• Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names Images, free, no account
  Names and testimony pages for victims of the Shoah, free, no account. THE SEARCH IS FULLY URL-DRIVEN even though the site is an Angular app: /en/names/search-results-names?page=N&gn_last_name=X&gnt_last_name=yvSynonym&gn_first_name=Y&gnt_first_name=yvSynonym, with gnt_ taking yvSynonym, literal or soundex. THE RESULTS COME IN THREE TABS AND THE SECOND IS THE ONE ALMOST NOBODY USES: “Results Regarding Victims”, “RESULTS REGARDING DATA SUBMITTERS” (append #submitter to the URL) and “Additional Results”. The submitter tab lists every record whose SUBMITTER matched the name searched — so SEARCHING A SURVIVOR'S NAME THERE RETURNS THE DEAD HE WROTE DOWN, and one Page of Testimony can be turned into a whole family in a single query. There are also Submitter Last Name and Submitter First Name fields in the advanced form for the same purpose. TWO THINGS MEASURED IN USE. (1) THE SYNONYM EXPANSION IS LOOSE and will fold in a different submitter of a similar name from another country — in one test, 24 of 29 results belonged to somebody else and had to be separated by place — so a submitter set must be READ and not counted. (2) A PAGE OF TESTIMONY IS A RELATIONSHIP DOCUMENT, NOT A DATE DOCUMENT. Written from memory, often decades later and often in Hebrew and auto-translated back, it is the best evidence there is for who was whose son and the worst for when: in one family read here a Page disagreed with the German federal memorial list on a birth day AND a death year (the lists were right both times), two Pages by the same man for the same victim gave two different places of death, and the same parents appeared under German forenames on one form and Hebrew ones on the other — which is itself a gift, because it hands you the Hebrew names a community register would use. What a Page gives that no list gives is the single word in the “relationship to victim” field: son, nephew, grandson.
• FamilySearch Images, free, account needed
  The largest free collection of record images and indexes in the world. A free account is required, and a minority of images are restricted to Family History Centres and affiliate libraries. TWO TRAPS IN THE CROATIAN HOLDINGS, both verified by use on 2026-10-09 and both capable of producing a confident false nil. (1) THE SAME PARISH SITS IN MORE THAN ONE COLLECTION. Bakar (Buccari) records are indexed under BOTH 'Croatia, Church Books, 1516-1994' (cc=2040054) AND 'Croatia, Delnice Deanery Catholic Church Books, 1571-1926'. A search restricted to 2040054 returns ZERO for records that demonstrably exist in the Delnice Deanery set - a marriage of 1783 at Bakar was found only once the collection filter was dropped. So a nil reported against one Croatian collection is a statement about that collection, never about the parish; and the catalogue's film list for a place may be split across collections that do not cross-reference each other. (2) SEARCH URL PARAMETERS SILENTLY FAIL. Hand-built query strings of the form /search/record/results?q.surname=X&q.anyPlace=Y returned 'Historical Record Search Results (0)' for a record whose own detail page gives exactly that surname and exactly that place string. The same query typed into the search form returns it. Place and collection parameters are the ones observed to fail; a bare q.surname + q.givenName pair did work. THE PRACTICAL RULE: never report a FamilySearch nil from a URL you assembled. Drive the form, and run a known-positive control - an ark id you already hold - through the same path first. An index entry is also a pointer and not a reading: the 1783 marriage above is indexed as two names and a date, and the words 'ex Gollogorizza' in the entry itself - the words that place the groom 130 km away in another crown land and make the record foreign to the Bakar set it sits in - appear nowhere in the index. Open the image before building or dismissing a household on an indexed record. Film and image-group identifiers DO work as stable handles where this collection's viewer carries no wc= waypoint: the Bakar marriage volume is film 005494714, 'Bakar. Religious Marriage Registers 1739-1808', item 1, 226 images, image group M99F-VRM. FULL-RESOLUTION IMAGES CAN BE DOWNLOADED, and it is worth knowing because the viewer's own zoom is a poor substitute for cropping locally. The download control in the image viewer opens a dialog offering 'PDF Record Image with Highlights', 'PDF with No Highlights', 'JPG Only' and 'No Record Image'. Choose JPG Only: it delivers the plate at native scan resolution - a Croatian parish register leaf came down at 5975x4206 - named <filmnumber>_<imagenumber>.jpeg, e.g. 005494714_00172.jpeg, which is a self-describing filename worth keeping. Note that the DeepZoom tiles the viewer itself loads (service/records/storage/deepzoomcloud/dz/v1/apid:<APID>/image_files/<level>/<col>_<row>.jpg) return 401 to an unauthenticated fetch and are blocked by CORS from the www origin, so scraping them is neither possible nor necessary; the download button is the supported route and it works. Resolution matters for more than comfort: a contested initial letter in a surname was settled only by cropping two words at identical magnification from the downloaded file, and the same comparison attempted through the viewer's zoom had been inconclusive.
• Geni Images, free, account needed
  One shared world tree. Useful for finding other researchers on the same line; not a record source, and its assertions are only as good as their citations.
• JewishGen Images, free, account needed
  The central Jewish genealogy resource — town-level KehilaLinks, burial and Holocaust databases, and revision lists for eastern Europe.
• BillionGraves Partly free, partly paid
  GPS-tagged headstone photographs. Smaller than Find a Grave but its coordinates are per-stone, which Find a Grave's often are not. FREE AND PAID ARE SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE, surveyed 7 October 2026 at a South African cemetery: the search, the transcription — name with full birth and death dates — and the per-stone GPS coordinates are free and need no account, and so is a 180x135 thumbnail of the stone. THE FULL-RESOLUTION PHOTOGRAPH IS NOT: it requires an account and a subscription. The thumbnail is far too small to read an inscription, so a transcription taken from here CANNOT BE CHECKED AGAINST THE STONE without paying — which matters, because a volunteer's reading of a weathered date is exactly the thing an archive will want to verify. AND ITS SEARCH URL SILENTLY IGNORES WHAT YOU ASK IT, which makes it USABLE FOR A POSITIVE AND USELESS FOR A NEGATIVE: a hit here is a hit, and no absence may be quoted from it. Verified 9 October: `cemetery_country=United+Kingdom` is accepted and disregarded — the results still carry United States and Australian stones — and `page` does nothing at all, `page=7` returning the identical six records as `page=1` under a footer reading «Page 1 of 178». The footer asserts a depth the URL cannot reach, so the first page is not the result set and nothing that looks like «no match in that country» is one.
• Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
  Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
• Ancestry Images, behind a paywall
  The largest commercial collection. Strong on the English-speaking world, censuses and immigration; weak on continental parish registers.
• MyHeritage Images, behind a paywall
  Commercial, with a large tree network and good European newspaper and directory coverage. Search is free; opening a record is not. A LINK CHECKER CANNOT TELL YOU WHETHER A MYHERITAGE CITATION IS ALIVE, measured 2026-10-09 against 428 of them carried into a family archive from a GEDCOM export. Record pages answer an unauthenticated request in one of two ways, and NEITHER IS AN HONEST 200: either a 302 to a door, or HTTP 200 WITH AN 843-BYTE BODY READING «Request unsuccessful. Incapsula incident ID: …». A checker that reads the status code alone therefore reports every one of them as RESOLVING. Any archive auditing its outward citations has to read the body, and should grade these neither alive nor dead.

FamilySearch collections that reach here

A collection is a claim over an area, not a book standing in this town — so these are ranked by how specifically they reach Lesotho. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.