I do not think that bankruptcy was a prerequisite. I have seen "insolvent" documents where it appears some property was seized to satisfy a debt without a complete bankruptcy. Keith ------ Original Message ------ Received: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 05:59:29 AM EST From: Richard Ball <[email protected]> To: RootsWeb Only <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [SOUTH-AFRICA] Extracts from the Cape Frontier Times January - March 1844, re E. R. Bell Hello Don Montague, Thursday, November 7, 2013, 9:55:35 AM, you wrote: RO> Sue Mackay's transcription included: RO> Notice to Creditors RO> Graham's Town, 14th March 1844 RO> In the Insolvent Estate of E.R. BELL, of Fort Beaufort, in the RO> District of Albany, Shopkeeper Insolvent estates are the financial accounts of bankruptcy procedings - of living people. Bankruptcies, judging from the NAIRS online index, were very common in the 19th Century Cape. All the best, Richard -- Richard Ball, Norfolk, England http://www.ballfamilyrecords.co.uk [email protected] ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to [email protected] with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

On 8 Nov 2013, at 6:57 AM, Keith Meintjes wrote: > I do not think that bankruptcy was a prerequisite. I have seen > "insolvent" > documents where it appears some property was seized to satisfy a > debt without > a complete bankruptcy. > > Keith The term "bankruptcy" is not nowadays used in South African Law: the correct term is "insolvency". However, the English term was more used by English settlers, and newspaper writers, especially in the Eastern Cape and Natal, tended to be relatively new immigrants. The insolvent might be alive or dead -- if alive, a person who was failing to pay his debts might be made formally insolvent by means of a petition in much the same way as such a person might be declared bankrupt in the UK, but if a deceased estate turned out to be insolvent this might only come to light when the nominated executor came to examine the assets and liabilities of the estate. I used to do estates for the old Standard Bank Trustee Branch in Cape Town many years ago and we avoided insolvent estates like the plague: they were a lot more bother to administer, involving creditors' meeting and the like, with no certainty of even getting a reasonable fee and no prospect at all of making a profit on the deal, so we generally refused to sign the acceptance of trust document and turned the case away. The customers concerned were, of course, of no value at all to the Bank, and there was provision for certain practitioners to do a cut-price job just to get rid of the problem. There was definitely a money-based class-system at work -- we were not so PC in those days. But in the early days, and especially before the passage of the Administration of Estates Act No. 24 of 1913, all sorts of informal methods of dealing with insolvent estates would have been employed; and even after, if the value of the estate was below the threshold set by the Act, which was one hundred pounds. People with such small estates were also more likely to die intestate, and often there was no formal notice of death at all -- people tended to keep free of the toils of the legal system if they could. The term "bankrupt" is of interesting origin: in the Middle Ages a money-changer who couldn't meet his obligations would be driven out of the market and his bench ("Bank" in German and Dutch -- this word found its way also into the Romance languages as "Banco" in Spanish and Portuguese, and "Banca" in Italian) would be broken up into little bits. ("Rupt" from the same Latin root as "rupture".) Money changers were the first bankers; they used to lend their stock-in- trade so that it could pay for its keep, but of course loans could go wrong, leaving the money-changer in deep trouble. It was the combination of foreign exchange, deposit-taking and landing that made up the modern bank and led to legislative control to regulate this important sector of the economy so it would not fail -- not always successfully! Andrew Rodger [email protected]