The De Mey van Streefkerk papers

This small collection of family papers, a total of slightly more than 2100 handwritten pages, was acquired for the James Ford Bell Library in 1957 by Curator John Parker. The documents pertain almost exclusively to the Surinam possessions of the prominent Dutch De Mey family, and they span the years 1717-1830. They contain information about the extended family and conditions in the plantation colony of Surinam in general, but they are particularly concerned with the family estate, including the plantations of Eghtenveen, Ephrata, Utrecht, Souberg, Klein Marceille, and Groot Marceille. The vast majority of the documents pertain to the core of these holdings, the large plantation of Marceille, which was formerly known as Eghtenveen. The other plantations were generally auxiliaries to Marceille.

The collection came into being as a result of the ambitious activities of the Surinam planter and chief auctioneer, Marcellius Jacobij, after whom the plantation Marceille is named. By the time of his death in 1742, Jacobij had developed a sizable estate. His three children had been sent to Holland for their education, and they never returned to live in Surinam. They and their heirs kept and even expanded the Jacobij inheritance as collective absentee landowners, leaving the plantations under the management of administrators. It was this agreement that essentially gave rise to the correspondence and many of the other documents in the collection.

One of the daughters of Jacobij married into the prominent De Mey van Streefkerk family. And one of the great grandsons of Jacobij, Jean Gijsberto de Mey, became mayor of the city of Leiden during the early part of the nineteenth century. He, and his grandfather during the late eighteenth century, made significant contributions to the correspondence of the family estate, and thus to the resulting collection of documents.