DOI: 10.34894/gcbfgn
title: Suriname Slave and Emancipation Registers Dataset Version 1.1

description: The slave register in the former Dutch colony of Suriname was established by Royal Decree in 1826 to combat the illegal international trade in enslaved people. Slave owners had to report the people in their possession and every mutation (such as births, deaths, purchases, and sales) to a civil servant. By registering people and their transfers, a closed registration was created that made it almost impossible to smuggle people illegally into Suriname. 
The registration in the slave registers was a continuous process which was maintained until the abolition of slavery in Suriname on 1 July 1863. Once every three to ten years, civil servants started a new series of registers into which the information that was still relevant was copied. As a result, there were a total of five series of slave registers. Not all the books of the slave registers have been preserved. The 1826-1830 series is completely missing. By estimation, a third of the slave registers from 1830 onwards have been lost, mainly from the older series. Of the 1830-1838 series only 42% of the registers still exists. Later series are much more complete: the survival rate is 55% of the series 1838-1848 and 72% of the series 1848-1851. The last series from 1851 to 1863 is more than 95% complete.
Within the slave registers, a distinction was made between enslaved people owned by plantations and people owned by private slave owners. This distinction makes it possible to research the workforces of different plantations. However, one has to be aware that slave registers registered ownership, not the actual workplace of enslaved people. People could be hired to other plantations. Between 1830 and 1848, the information for each enslaved person is limited. Beside the name of the owner, only the name of the enslaved, the gender and sometimes the age were registered. By new-born children the name of the mother was also mentioned. The dates mentioned in the slave registers are the ‘mutation dates’, the date of registration of each event, not the actual date of the event. Because some plantations only registered new-borns and deaths only twice a year, there could be months between an event and its registration. Over the years, the information recorded in the slave registers increased. Starting in 1848 the slave registers mention the birth year and the name of the mother of each person, which makes reconstructions of female family lineage possible. From 1850 onwards, the actual dates of births and deaths had to be registered also. Fathers were never registered, and neither was cohabitation. Families were not normally registered together as a group. 
When slavery was abolished in 1863, two new registrations were generated. Slave owners had to hand in lists of the people they owned, in order to claim a compensation from the Dutch government. These list, called ‘Borderellen’, contains information on owner, name of the enslaved, sex, age, religion and occupation. Furthermore, a register of names was created for each district in which the emancipated former enslaved were registered with their new family name, first names, year of birth, name they had before 1863, place of living and sometimes information on family relations. The information in these two sources was combined by Lamur et al (2004) in one Emancipation dataset. This dataset is added to the database with the permission of the authors. The current version is version 1.1