This evening there was a news item about a daguerreotype from 1846 from Surinam.
He is called Johannes Ellis, her name is Maria Louisa de Hart. He is born in 1812 in the Ghanese town Elmina, as the son of the Dutch governor and a Ghanese woman.
She is born in 1826 on the plantation Sardam on the Cotticariver in Surinam. Her father is a Jew from Amsterdam: Mozes Meyer de Hart. The planter has twelve children with the freed slave Carolina Petronella van de Hart. Maria is one of those children.
Maria is pregnant on this picture.
The Ellis couple departs for The Netherlands in 1860.
Their unborn son of the picture, Abraham George Ellis joins the Dutch Navy, fights in Atjeh in the Dutch East Indies, lives a while in South America and becomes Minister of the Navy in the Dutch government from 1902 to 1905.
He died in 1916 and was buried by a big crowd, among which the husband of the Dutch Queen.
