03/03/2026
A VERY INFORMATIVE ARTICLE ON THE MARITAL STATUS PROBLEM ON DEATH CERTIFICATES.
Till death do us part? No, wait for Home Affairs
News24 – 28 February 2026
Death or divorce may have parted you from your spouse, but Home Affairs could well still consider you married. Happily, a digital solution is on the horizon at last, writes Wendy Knowler.
You may have a divorce order issued by the High Court or a death certificate with your late spouse’s name on it, but as far as the Department of Home Affairs is concerned, you could still be married.
And that has dire consequences – if you die as a married person rather than a widowed one, your heirs won’t be able to have your estate wound up until you’ve had your status updated. That’s a major schlep, and once they’ve jumped through all the admin hoops, it could still take up to a year, often longer, for the change to reflect on the Home Affairs system.
Many people have assumed that the high court automatically shared their divorce order with Home Affairs – as used to happen in the past – but have gone on to discover that they are officially still married to their ex.
It’s particularly unfortunate if that discovery is only made when they are preparing to remarry.
However, before they can apply to Home Affairs to have that changed, they have to first pay a visit to the high court that granted their divorce. There, they must ask a clerk for a form proving that their divorce order is genuine.
Because, well, these documents are often forged.
If they no longer live in the city where their divorce order was granted, the official word is they must sommer travel to visit that high court in person.
I discovered this marital status issue after a friend’s mother died last month, two years after her father’s death.
The trustees of the mother’s estate have alerted the daughter to the fact that the estate can’t be wound up until they engage with Home Affairs to have the mother’s marital status altered from married to widowed.
‘Long and complicated’
My father died in 2021 – what if Home Affairs still considers my own mother, turning 86 this year, to be married, I thought?
Turns out it does. When I took her to a home affairs branch recently, armed with her ID document, my father’s death certificate and their marriage certificate, the official made copies and then warned her that the process is “long and complicated”, and that she will have to wait for up to 12 months, possibly longer, for her official status to be changed.
And no, they wouldn’t be notifying her, as they do when your passport or ID card is ready for collection. “You must come back to us to check after six to eight months.”
Rhona Peters’ mother died in November 2022, three years after the death of her father in 2019.
In 2024, the family discovered that the winding up of her mother’s estate couldn’t proceed because her marital status was still captured as married, rather than widowed.
“We submitted all the required documents to Home Affairs in Umgeni Road, Durban, in May 2024, but every time I have gone there since I am told it has still not been rectified,” Rhona told me this week.
You’re divorced, but Home Affairs says you’re married
Not being regarded by Home Affairs as being divorced despite possessing a final divorce order can also come as a bit of a shock. And I speak from recent personal experience.
The Home Affairs official who dealt with the change to my mother’s marital status also cheerfully told me she could not accept my application until I could produce documentary proof from the high court where my divorce was finalised – years ago – that the divorce order was legitimate. As I no longer live in Durban, that involves airfares.
Home Affairs spokesman Thulani Mavuso said it is possible to authorise someone to do it on my behalf, but he advised me to rather approach the high court for the required verification in person.
Quite a few of the divorced people I know also had no idea that they were still officially married to their exes; that is, until they checked.
I was never informed that I had to take my divorce order to Home Affairs myself. One assumes that one government department communicates with another because that’s what used to happen.
But not anymore.
Broken telephone
Mavuso said the issues I raised in my query were “symptoms of legacy systems that were never designed to give individuals visibility or control over their own identity records”.
In the past, he said, high court divorce decrees were routinely transmitted to the Department of Home Affairs, enabling automatic updates to marital status.
“But this practice is no longer applied consistently due to the absence of a fully integrated electronic interface between the courts and the department, delays in manual transmission, and inconsistent submission of documentation.”
So a divorce order no longer “reliably triggers” an automatic marital status update.
“Affected individuals currently need to approach a Home Affairs office to request the change,” Mavuso said.
“Similarly, while marriages solemnised and registered by authorised marriage officers should update automatically, late or incomplete submission of marriage registers can prevent this from happening.”
As for why so many widowed people are dying with their official status reflecting as “married”, causing massive delays in winding up their estates, it’s the same story.
“Current systems are fragmented and rely heavily on manual follow-through,” Mavuso said, adding:
If a status update is not successfully captured, there is often no automated mechanism to detect the failure. As a result, errors may remain unnoticed for years and only surface during estate administration.
At one point, Home Affairs advertised an SMS service as a way to check your marital status. You could send the letter “M”, followed by your ID number, to a number and get your status in response.
But the service has been discontinued due to “privacy and data protection considerations”, Mavuso said. “Marital status may be verified at local Home Affairs offices.”
Great, let’s send more people to the country’s already overburdened Home Affairs offices to find out whether they’re still married or not.
“The Department of Home Affairs recognises that questions around marital status records are deeply personal and often arise at difficult moments such as estate administration or elder care,” Mavuso said.
Digital solution in the works
But there’s good news. Digital Identity is coming soon – well, soonish – to spare us all this unnecessary schlep, indignity and anguish.
“Implementing Digital Identity is the department’s major administrative focus of the year,” Mavuso said. “It will fundamentally change how identity information, including marital status, is recorded, verified, and accessed.”
Paper-based fragmented systems will be replaced by a secure, person-centred digital framework.
“We’ll be able to check our marital status on our smartphones, with built-in biometric verification, rather than discovering errors years later during estate administration or legal processes,” he said.
“The shift to digital verification will significantly reduce fraud, queues, paperwork, and opportunities for corruption, while restoring dignity to how identity is managed.“
That sounds positively utopian compared with the system we are saddled with right now.
Asked when we can expect Digital Identity to take over, I was told only that it’s going through the policymaking and Cabinet process, “and will be published for public comment at the appropriate time”.
Yes, very vague.
So, I’d say it will be late 2026 at the earliest. Full implementation will probably only be 2027. It may be wise to opt for the frustrating, antiquated route in the meantime.
