You came for family. Go and see where it began.

There is a trip that is made constantly and served almost never. You were born in the Netherlands, your parents or grandparents in Suriname. You come to see family, you stay with an aunt, you eat until you cannot move, and after two weeks you fly home without ever having seen where the story starts.

Most travel companies target Dutch holidaymakers discovering Suriname as a destination. Most Surinamese operators serve whoever happens to walk in. For someone with family here there is nothing specific, even though that group is the most motivated visitor there is.

So we built it as its own product. Beforehand we send you a questionnaire: surnames, districts, dates, the stories told at home. We do the groundwork with it, so the morning in the archive is not spent working out where to look.

What the sources contain is sometimes hard going. The emancipation registers of 1 July 1863 list roughly 33,000 people with the surname they were given at abolition, often a name invented by a clerk or a plantation owner. The immigration registers give a name, a home village, a ship and the plantation someone was sent to. These are not romantic documents.

And then we go there. To the plantation in Commewijne or Para, to the neighbourhood in Paramaribo, or to the cemetery. If the line runs to a village on the Upper Suriname River, that is a multi-day trip and we quote it separately.

You receive everything digitally afterwards: scans, photographs, names, and a summary of what we found and where it came from. That is the part you take home and show your parents.

Frequently asked questions

What is a roots trip to Suriname?

A trip where you do not only visit relatives but find out where your family came from: in the archives, and then on the ground, a plantation, a neighbourhood, a cemetery. Our roots day costs €85 per person and consists of a morning in the National Archives and an afternoon on location.

Can you trace a Surinamese family tree?

Often, up to a point. The National Archives of Suriname holds the emancipation registers of 1 July 1863 with roughly 33,000 names, the immigration registers of Hindustani indentured labourers from 1873 and Javanese from 1890, civil registration and plantation administration. How far you get depends on the line: some run back into the eighteenth century, others stop abruptly.

What do I need to start?

One surname and a district is enough. A birth year or a plantation name makes it much faster. Send us what you have in advance, including loose stories from parents or grandparents, and we do the groundwork.

Is this suitable with children?

From around ten, yes. A morning in an archive is too long for younger children; in that case we do the research without them and go to the place together in the afternoon. Our four-day family plan is built that way.

What if we find nothing?

It happens, more often than people expect, the 1863 emancipation registers hold roughly 33,000 names, but not every line was continuously recorded afterwards. So we promise no result, only that you end the day further along than you started and that you receive every scan and photograph digitally. If a line stops, we say so and explain why.