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Inventories of the Orphan Chamber
of the Cape of Good Hope


Making the Inventories available in digital format

Ms Ellen Berends, former Consul General of the Netherlands in Cape Town, initiated the project and was instrumental in the approval and funding of the first phase of the transcription project that lasted 15 months, from 1 October 2004 to 31 December 2005. The Royal Netherlands Embassy in Pretoria has generously approved an application for a second phase, running from 1 February to the end of December 2006.

The records of the Orphan Chamber are housed at the Cape Town Archives Repository in Roeland Street, Cape Town. They form an exceptionally rich collection of material covering most of the VOC period and the first decades of British rule at the Cape. The documents are heavily used as a result and are rapidly deteriorating. The records are unique to the Cape Town Archives Repository as, unlike the Council of Policy and Council of Justice records, copies were not sent to the Netherlands.

The estate records form the single most cohesive record of privately owned slaves at the Cape (and they were the large majority of the slave population). The transcription project thus responds to the growing call for a focus on the documentation of slave history and the identification of slave forbears.

All the documents were transcribed in the international platform-independent XML format (eXtensible Mark-up Language), where the coding was done according to the internationally acknowledged TEI standard (Text Encoding Initiative). The Centre for Business and Language Services/Sentrum vir Besigheids- en Taaldiens (Bellville, South Africa) performed the technical implementation and also provided XML and TEI training for the TEPC team.

The data is hosted by the National Archives of the Netherlands in The Hague as it has the capacity to do so. At a later stage the Cape Town Archives Repository will take over this responsibility, because it also keeps the authentic records of the Master of the Orphan Chamber.

 

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