The Paramaribo Ward Registers

Between 1828-1846, the colonial government of Paramaribo, Suriname, kept a detailed register of the inhabitants of the city. These sources have recently been transcribed but the transcriptions are not well accessible. In this project, the data will be harmonized and made available as a FAIR database that can be used for both scholarly research as well as by a wider public for family history. The data will be deposited at the IISH Dataverse and hosted by the National Archives of Suriname. The registers contain rich information, with names, age, occupation, ethnicity and religion of (free) inhabitants, as well as the number of enslaved people living on an address. Therefore, such a database will function as a metaphorical time machine of a mid-nineteenth colonial city, showing residential patterns changing through time, how people moved through the city. Most importantly, it will provide a powerful tool for researching family history and genealogy.