Many people in the Indian Diaspora are engaged in tracing their family roots in India. Different archives and researchers have succeeded in making available archival records that enables a genealogist to find the name of a district, police station and village in India.
In Suriname the National Foundation Indian Immigration (NSHI) and the Sarnámihuis Foundation in the Netherlands have finished a database that is unique in its nature. Its starting point is not the archive, but the person who is constructing a family history. In addition it makes full use of modern technology to process and present the data. The result is a collection of databases on Surinamese India that combines different archival sources and put them in a central digital location, transforms unstructured data (letters) into structured data (tables with names of people mentioned in the letters), links the historical geography of India (district, police station and village) with the current geography (state, district, sub district, post office, village), uses Google Map to visually show the historical and current data and presents all the information in a multilingual website (Dutch, English, Hindi). Sandew Hira, the creator of the Central Historical Database of Hindustanis (CHDH) will give a presentation of this database. Tanya Sitaram, who together with Sandew Hira produced the 10-volume encyclopedia on the Calcutta Letters will talk about the content of the unstructured data. Rita Tjien Fooh, director of the National Archives of Suriname, will go into the work of the archives in tracing the roots of the different ethnic groups in Suriname.
Date and time
Sunday November 26, 16.00 Suriname time, 21.00 Amsterdam time