On Thursday 19 May 2022, a team from the Built Heritage Suriname Foundation (SGES) paid a working visit to the Coronie district to inspect and document some historic graves on the Bellevue plantation. The reason for this is the message from Mrs. M. Vroom, that some old graves on the plantation would have been damaged as a result of rehabilitation work on the East-West connection. The SGES team consisted of Rachel Deekman, Jennifer Scheuerman and Stephen Fokké.

The historic graves at the front of the Salem Church at Clyde Plantation in Coronie were partially documented for the first time, in 2003, by Philip Dikland. Of the 18 graves, 8 had been mapped. Two large brick tombs have no headstone, so it is unknown who is buried there. In 2014, Dikland documented another seven graves together with Max van de Poel.

The core of the Surinamese economy was formed by the plantations until well into the nineteenth century. The plantation was the production unit, but also the social unit: an autonomous community of between 50 and 500 people. The owner and his family lived there, and then there was the free staff, consisting of director, supervisors and sometimes craftsmen. But the vast majority of the community were enslaved people. All of them were buried on the plantation. The owner and director in a small, distinguished cemetery near the plantation house, the enslaved in a simple cemetery near the edge of the plantation. It is not known where the free personnel were buried.

After the successful establishment of a Dutch colony on the southern tip of Manhattan, the first regular church services were held in 1628 in the fort Nieuw Amsterdam. This happened in a room of the grain mill that the colonists had built here. In 1633, the first wooden church was built near the banks of the East River.

In New York's nearly 400 years of existence, countless cemeteries have been laid out, used and disappeared. The oldest, especially churchyards, date from the second half of the seventeenth century, when first the Dutch and later the English had control over the settlement. With the growth of New York, the need for larger cemeteries arose. These cemeteries were no longer built close to the city, but further away, in places that were less suitable for agriculture, for example. With many of those cemeteries from the nineteenth century, there is no immediate thought of a link with Dutch history, but there often is such as at Green-Wood in Brooklyn.

Peter Stuyvesant was director-general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland from 1647 until it was ceded to the English in 1664. Stuyvesant was not well liked. Although the colony continued to expand during his reign, he was in constant conflict with the population.

In 1651 Peter Stuyvesant bought building (farm) No. 1 from the WIC, located about ten kilometres outside the settlement. The building (pronounced boweray in English, later bowry) included land with outbuildings, livestock and two enslaved Africans.^[1] Stuyvesant had a chapel built on the piece of land in 1660 for his neighbours and employees.^[2] This fact in itself is remarkable, as a private chapel was not common for Protestants. But Stuyvesant may have chosen this because the distance to New Amsterdam was too great. It is not known exactly what the chapel looked like.

The gravestone of Hendrik Duurkoop in the Dutch Cemetery at Goshinji temple in Nagasaki has long been famous as the oldest surviving gravestone in Japan belonging to a European.^[1] Duurkoop, who divided most of his adult life between Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) and Nagasaki, died at sea at the age of 42 en route to his second posting as director (opperhoofd) of the Dutch factory at Dejima. This essay assembles the available historical materials in Dutch and Japanese to give a brief account of Duurkoop’s life and the history of his gravestone after his death.^[2]

In 2003, Ms Hisayo Murase published the book 'Verbeck of Japan'. The book is a translation in Japanese of the biography of Guido Hermann Fridolin Verbeek written by W.E. Griffis in 1901 and provided with annotations.

In 2012, again in Japan, a second book on Verbeek's life was published, entitled: 'Guido F. Verbeck. A life of determined acceptance.' from Ms Noriko Itoh. Verbeck is an Anglicization of the family name Verbeek. The Dutchman Verbeek made a great contribution to the development of Japan in the nineteenth century. Besides composer Willem Pijper and poet Hendrik Marsman, he may be considered one of the greatest sons of Zeist. Despite this his name is unknown in Zeist and nothing reminds of him in his home village.

In 1641 the Dutch were forced to move from Hirado to Nagasaki and lost their privilige to bury their dead on land. Those who died were buried at sea instead. In October 1654 the Dutch were finally given permission to bury their dead on land again, but it still took almost a year before the first body was actually interred in a grave.