A historical register contains 21,515 entries for 13,062 unique enslaved individuals in Curaçao between 1839 and 1863. The dataset was created by Coen van Galen and harvested by DataverseNL. It documents names, gender, birth year, mother's name, and life events like birth, death, sale, and release.
Use Cases
- Analyze demographic patterns and family structures based on recorded mother-child relationships.
- Track individual life events and mobility based on registered changes like sale, release, and death.
- Study the scale and administration of slavery based on the coverage of 1,070 pages of registers.
Strengths
- Contains 21,515 entries for 13,062 unique individuals, providing substantial individual-level data.
- Covers a 24-year period from 1839 to 1863, allowing for longitudinal study.
- The description specifies it is a 'closed registration,' enabling tracking of individuals throughout their enslavement.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Excludes government-owned enslaved persons, potentially omitting up to a hundred individuals.
- Father's name is universally absent as enslaved persons were not permitted to marry.
Provenance
- Source
- Curaçao colonial administration registers, processed by Coen van Galen.
- Collection Method
- Historical administrative record-keeping.
- Time Range
- 1839 to 1863
- Freshness
- Last updated 2026-06-01 06:10:33; freshness should be verified.
- Geography
- Curaçao