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CAPE TOWN 'S PAST DIGITISED
The transcription of VOC documents
Over its existence from the 1700's to about 1850 The Orphan Chamber, a sort of registry office for wills and estates of the colony, accumulated a goldmine of records. It is said to have been set up to protect orphaned children and their inheritances against grasping relatives and friends.
The records include inventories of assets in which everything from crockery and belt buckles to livestock and slaves were painstakingly listed. In turn auction rolls, also part of the collection hold thorough details of goods, sellers, buyers and prices that items and slaves fetched.
For genealogy-seekers who regularly turn up at the repository, the books are invaluable. They are considered to be about the richest record of privately-owned slaves of the era and just the ticket for tracing the family tree.
These days the bulk of these documents is housed at the Cape Town Archives Repository in Roeland Street . Prompted by a widespread interest in slave history among researchers here and in the Netherlands , the Dutch consul general Ellen Berends, a historian in her own right, convinced the Dutch government to bankroll an international drive to foster research in countries with which the Netherlands shares a common heritage.
Over the next year a team of two editors and four transcribers from UCT & UWC will faithfully copy the hand-written Dutch entries of the OrphanChamber documents into a customised software programme, and the National Archives of the Netherlands in The Hague will host the transcriptions on its website www. nationaalarchief.nl, until such time as the National Archives of South Africa has the capacity to do so.
The project, being overseen by Dr Antonia Malan of UCT's Department of Archaeology, is a R 2-million collaboration between UCT and UWC to make these records available on CD Rom and the Internet.
“We chose inventories because of their unique opportunity they gave to trace the passage of slaves from one family to another” said Dr Susan Newton-King, of the UWC Department of History. “It's possible to do some quire detailed reconstruction of this passage through the material”'.
According to UCT's Professor Nigel Worden who heads the project, the documents are testimony to the meticulous Dutch bureaucracy of the time, and researchers are grateful. The South African collection, by virtue of both its volume and condition, are unequalled and the envy of may a scholar.
“As far as I know, these records are unique in the kind of archives of colonial society during this period' he says. “North American researchers especially have been astonished by how good these records are. They would give their eye teeth for this kind of material''.
Acknowledgement: The Monday Paper, UCT, Volume 24
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