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A Further Note on the Amsterdam Notarial Records1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Adam Jones
Adam Jones*
Affiliation:
Frobenius-Institut, Frankfurt am Main
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Extract

In a note in this journal R.A. Kea advises researchers to allow at least six months for using the notarial records of the Amsterdam Municipal Archives because, he says, they have not been indexed. Although this is largely true, there is a complete index for the years 1701-1710 and about ten per cent of the other notarial records written between 1578 and 1800 have so far been indexed. The drawer of index cards for west Africa, typed in modern Dutch and arranged according to geographical location, gives the researcher a good review of the material available, since the summaries often amount to over a hundred words. The index cards may only be consulted in the archive and may not be photocopied, but it is possible to take home photocopies of manuscripts. The index will remain incomplete for many years to come. Even so, it provides a useful starting point and anyone interested in the west African coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in a single locality, will find even a day or two spent in this archive most valuable. In addition to the notarial records, the archive contains several other documents referring to west Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 9 , 1982 , pp. 367 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1982

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Footnotes

1.

I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung for enabling me to visit Amsterdam as part of my research on seventeenth-century west African history and to P.H.J. van der Laan, M.P.H. Roessingh, and R.A. Kea for their comments on the first draft of this note.

References

NOTES

2. Kea, R.A., “A Note on the Town Archives of Amsterdam: The Notarial Records,” HA, 7(1980), 355–57.Google Scholar

3. For example, it does not include a reference to Benin and Biafra cited in ibid., 356. A few of the proposed identifications are incorrect: for instance, the ‘Rio Junko’ mentioned in 1745 was the Junk (Liberia), not the Njong (Cameroon).

4. These are listed in Carson, Patricia, Materials for West African History in the Archives of Belgium and Holland (London, 1962), 24–26Google Scholar, and Roessingh, M.P.H. and Visser, W., Guide to the Sources of the History of Africa South of the Sahara in the Netherlands (Munich, 1978), 150–52.Google Scholar