Gauteng, CULLINAN district, Beynespoort 335, Miners cemetery (2)

Cemetery information:- Gravestones for the Beynespoort cemetery close to Cullinan. The cemetery is not maintained any more and is overgrown with tall grass, trees and other plant life. Some of the graves are starting to cave in and there seems to be animals living in the graves. The graveyard was started before the the Cullinan diamond mine opened. The people buried here are mostly people who tried to find diamonds. The then owner of the farm provided the section of land on his farm for the miners to bury their dead. Most of the graves - surprisingly - have grave stones. The grave stones are made from granite, limestone, cement, etc. The graves without stones are difficult to find in the plant growth, so it was not possible to map the actual layout of the cemetery. For this reason only the grave stones were photographed and deciphered. What was very noticeable, was the large amount of child graves. The impression was that at least half of the graves in the cemetery were children. Whether there are records somewhere of who is buried in the cemetery's unmarked graves is not known. Maybe the churches in Cullinan might still have records of who they buried there. The interesting part is in how a good condition most of the gravestones were. Unfortunately some of the gravestones made from cement had weathered so much, that the writing was not visible any more. The impression was that many people wanted to have a gravestone on their loved one's grave, but did not have the means to pay for it. Martin Knoetze

eGGSA captions by Alta Griffiths

Information also available on the GGSA Cemetery DVD:- Cemetery ID: 2262 Names in cemetery: 67 Information submitted by: Martin Knoetze

Google Earth Project Information:- GPSID: 3167 GPS: -25 39.180, 28 27.460