For Dutch information about the project, click here.
The Historical Database Suriname and the Carribean's aim is to make lifecourses of all inhabitants of Suriname and Curacao from about 1830 to 1950 available in demographic databases. This database connects persons who appear in various archival sources, such as the slave registers, emancipation registers, migration registers of indentured laborers, civil registers and censuses. As first steps of this project databases of the Surinamese migration registers of Chinese, Indian and Javanese indentured laborers were created and the slave registers of Suriname and the slave and emancipation registers of Curacao were brought online in 2018-2020. We are currently working on databases of the civil records of Suriname and Curacao. The first part of the civil records database has been published on the website of the National Archives Suriname.
This website is a platform aimed at researchers who want more information about this demographic database project and about the sources that are already available online: the migration registers of indentured laborers in Suriname and the slave registers of Suriname and Curacao. Those slave registers, kept in the National Archives of Suriname and in the National Archives of Curacao are valuable sources, included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. They make it possible to follow almost all enslaved people in Suriname and Curacao from the 1830s until the abolition of slavery in 1863. The migration registers offer a wealth of information on the lives of indentured laborers from China, India and Java (Indonesia) who were brought to Suriname to replace slave labor from the 1850s onwards.
