Indonesia Emigration and Immigration

From FamilySearch Wiki
Indonesia Wiki Topics
Flag of Indonesia.svg.png
Beginning Research
Record Types
Indonesia Background
Local Research Resources

Online Records[edit | edit source]

Naturalization Records[edit | edit source]

Finding the Town of Origin in Indonesia[edit | edit source]

If you are using emigration/immigration records to find the name of your ancestors' town in Indonesia, see Indonesia Finding Town of Origin for additional research strategies.

Indonesia Emigration and Immigration[edit | edit source]

"Emigration" means moving out of a country. "Immigration" means moving into a country.
Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in the country. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants’ names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birthplaces. Sometimes they also show family groups.

Immigration into Indonesia[edit | edit source]

  • The first Europeans arrived in the archipelago in 1512, when Portuguese traders, led by Francisco Serrão, sought to monopolize the sources of nutmeg, cloves, and cubeb pepper in the Maluku Islands.
  • Dutch and British traders followed. In 1602, the Dutch established the Dutch East India Company and became the dominant European power for almost 200 years. The VOC was dissolved in 1800 following bankruptcy, and the Netherlands established the Dutch East Indies as a nationalized colony. For most of the colonial period, Dutch control over the archipelago was tenuous. In December 1949, the Dutch formally recognized Indonesian independence.
  • In 1930, Dutch and other Europeans, Eurasians, and derivative people like the Indos, numbered 240,000 or 0.4% of the total population. Historically, they constituted only a tiny fraction of the native population and remain so today. The Dutch colonial empire's primary purpose was commercial exchange as opposed to sovereignty over homogeneous landmasses.[1]

Indos[edit | edit source]

  • The Indo people or Indos, are Eurasian people living in or connected with Indonesia. In its narrowest sense, the term refers to people in the former Dutch East Indies who held European legal status but were of mixed Dutch and indigenous Indonesian descent as well as their descendants today. The European ancestry of these people was predominantly Dutch, but also included Portuguese, British, French, Belgian, German and others.[2]
  • In the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), the Dutch heavily interacted with the indigenous population, and as European women were almost non-existent, many Dutchmen married native women. This created a new group of people, the Dutch-Eurasians also known as 'Indos' or 'Indo-Europeans'.
  • During the 1620s, Jan Pieterszoon Coen in particular insisted that families and orphans be sent from Holland to populate the colonies. As a result, a number of single women were sent and an orphanage was established in Batavia to raise Dutch orphan girls to become East India brides. There was a large number of women from the Netherlands recorded as marrying in the years around 1650. Almost half of them were single women from the Netherlands marrying for the first time. There were still considerable numbers of women sailing eastwards to the Indies at this time.
  • Few European women came to the Indies during the Dutch East India Company period. There is evidence of considerable care by officers of the Dutch East India Company for their illegitimate Eurasian children: boys were sometimes sent to the Netherlands to be educated, and sometimes never returned to Indonesia.
  • In the 1890s, there were 62,000 civilian "Europeans" in the Dutch East Indies, most of them Eurasians, making up less than half of one per cent of the population. Indo influence waned following World War I and the opening of the Suez Canal, when there was a substantial influx of white Dutch families.
  • During World War II the European colonies in South East Asia, including the Dutch East Indies, were invaded and annexed by the Japanese Empire. The Japanese sought to eradicate anything reminiscent of European government. Many of the Indies Dutch spent World War II in Japanese concentration camps. [2]

Emigration from Indonesia[edit | edit source]

Types of Records[edit | edit source]

Immigration, naturalization and foreigner registration (Imigrasi, pewarganegaraan, kewarganegaraan)[edit | edit source]

These records are very valuable for making proper connections to place of origin in other countries, and for pinpointing place of residence in Indonesia. Many researchers do not know their ancestor's place of origin. They are generally available from the 1700s to the present. Records can be found at the National Archives, municipal archives, and Chinese community kapitans.

They generally include the immigrant’s name, age, occupation, birth date and place, former residence, destination; wife’s name, childrens’ given names and ages or number of children; religion, race, nationality, sometimes picture. Chinese immigration records give names and places in Chinese characters.

References[edit | edit source]

  1. ↑ "Indonesia", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia#Ethnic_groups_and_languages, accessed 7 July 2021.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Indo people", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo_people, accessed 24 April 2021.

This website requires a paid subscription for full access. Some subscription websites are available for free at your local FamilySearch Center or Affiliate Library.

To access available information, first log into FamilySearch.

Retrieved from "https://integration-ru.familysearch.org/en/wiki/index.php?title=Indonesia_Emigration_and_Immigration&oldid=4518780"