Three Kinds of Search
Family history that crosses between Ghana and the Netherlands usually takes one of three forms: tracing descent from a Euro-African family of Elmina or another coastal town; tracing a West African soldier recruited into the Dutch East Indies army and his descendants in Java; or tracing a modern migrant family that came to the Netherlands from Ghana since the 1970s. The sources differ completely, so it is worth being clear at the start which search you are conducting.
Euro-African Families of the Coast
Two and a half centuries of Dutch presence produced a substantial Euro-African population at Elmina and the outforts — the descendants of unions between Company men and Akan women, who became merchants, interpreters, clerks and brokers, and whose family names still exist in Ghana. Tracing these lines is possible because the Dutch kept records.
- Church registers. Baptism and marriage registers were kept at Elmina by the Dutch Reformed establishment and survive within the Guinea coast archives at the Nationaal Archief. They record names, parentage and dates and are the backbone of this kind of research.
- Company personnel records. Service registers, salary lists and muster rolls establish when a European man was on the coast, in what post, and often when he died.
- Wills, estates and debt records. Probate and estate papers frequently name children and partners who appear nowhere else, and they are one of the few places where the family arrangements of Company servants are described plainly.
- Correspondence and appointment files. Euro-African men who held office under the Dutch appear by name in administrative records throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Scholarship helps here: the work of Michel Doortmont and Natalie Everts on the Euro-African households of Elmina has already reconstructed many of the principal families, and published genealogies save an enormous amount of duplicated effort.
Belanda Hitam Descent
Between the 1830s and 1872 several thousand West African men were recruited at Elmina for the colonial army in the Dutch East Indies. Their descendants live in Indonesia, the Netherlands and Ghana, and this is one of the most-asked family history questions on this subject. The paper trail is unusually good, because armies keep records.
- Service registers of the colonial army. The Dutch national archive holds the personnel registers of the East Indies army, recording name, origin, date and place of enlistment, physical description, postings, promotions, wounds, and discharge or death. For a West African recruit this is often the only document that names him as an individual.
- Recruitment correspondence. The files on the Elmina depot, the transports and the recruitment agreement itself sit in the Guinea coast and colonial ministry archives.
- Records in Indonesia. Civil registration, garrison and municipal records for the towns where the men were stationed and settled — Purworejo in Central Java is the best-known community — are held in Indonesian archives, with some duplicate material in the Netherlands.
- Pension and veterans' records. Men who completed service and their widows appear in pension administration, which sometimes gives family detail the service register omits.
Names are the main obstacle. Recruits were commonly given Dutch names on enlistment, so a man may appear in Dutch records under a name his family in Ghana would not recognise, and in Javanese records under a further variant. Work outward from the enlistment entry rather than from the name alone.
The Ghanaian Side
Records in Ghana are organised differently, and the most important point is structural: Akan society is matrilineal. Descent, inheritance and membership of the abusua pass through the mother, so following a surname down the male line — the standard European method — will not track an Akan family. Ask about the lineage and the mother's line first.
- Family and lineage memory. Elders hold genealogies as a matter of practical necessity, since they determine rights to land and office. This is the primary source, not a supplement to the archives.
- Mission church registers. Basel and Wesleyan mission stations kept baptism, marriage and burial records from the nineteenth century, held by the successor churches and in mission archives in Europe.
- PRAAD. Chieftaincy and stool dispute files contain recorded genealogies in great quantity, and court records name individuals and their relationships.
- Civil registration. Statutory registration of births, marriages and deaths is comparatively recent and its coverage in earlier decades was partial.
Where to Get Help
In the Netherlands the national archive in The Hague holds the Company, colonial army and Indies material, much of it indexed and partly digitised; the national centre for family history in The Hague holds civil registration and personal records and provides research guidance; and there are established societies for people researching families with Indies connections. In Ghana, PRAAD and the churches are the institutional route, and family elders are the essential one. Because these searches cross languages, alphabets and record-keeping traditions, most successful projects involve correspondence with researchers on the other side.
A Word About Expectations and Care
These records were created in conditions of profound inequality, and what they contain can be difficult. A service register may record a man's purchase price alongside his enlistment. A baptism entry may name a child and not its mother. Researchers should also be prepared for gaps that cannot be closed: fires, damp, and the simple fact that many people were never written down at all. What survives is real and worth recovering, but a complete line back to the eighteenth century is the exception rather than the expectation.
