About the project

Bringing the slave registers of Suriname and Curacao online in 2018/19 and 2020 were the first steps in an ambitious plan to make demographic information available in one large database about the inhabitants of former Dutch colonies in the Americas, from about 1830 to 1950. This database connects persons who appear in various archive sources, such as slave registers, emancipation registers, civil records, registration of migrants, and censuses. This makes it easier to trace ancestors, but it also opens up all kinds of possibilities for scientific research into the lives of people in a tropical colonial society. Such a historical database covering multiple generations of an entire population is unique in the world. This project is possible because of the high quality of the sources that are kept in the national archives of Suriname, Curacao and the Netherlands.

This model gives an overview of the sources available for Suriname, which can be used to create a database of the population of colonial Suriname between 1830 and 1950.