Tamil indenture records: country-by-country index

Colonial-era paperwork tracking Tamil-speaking labourers who left Madras Presidency ports under indenture contracts between the 1830s and 1920s. Typical fields: immigration or indenture number, ship, arrival port, estate assignment, village of origin, and parents’ names. Different colonies used different naming conventions — "immigrant number" (Trinidad/Guyana), "immigration pass" (Mauritius), "pass number" (Fiji), "engagé contract" (French colonies).

Six today: South Africa (152,273 Natal arrivals, 1860–1911), Mauritius (773 destination-side records + the shared India-side index), Jamaica (435 destination-side + III), Fiji (104 destination-side; also scans III), Suriname (III + Dutch slavery/civil registers), and Réunion (III only; results are not destination-filtered, so triangulate with ship + year). The remaining destinations (Guyana, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Seychelles) have landing pages that accept family-paper contributions but no per-person search yet.

Our Mauritius slice comes from the TNA UK Colonial Office correspondence, not the Mauritius Government Information Centre (MGI) which holds the full Aapravasi Ghat records. Full MGI ingestion requires a formal partnership; TNA was the public-domain baseline we could ship first.

Yes — the Tamil Nadu voter roll cross-reference is where the real power is. A Natal arrival record often gives the "zillah" (district) + "thana" (sub-district); current Tamil Nadu voter rolls let you find living families still in that area. Combined, you can often trace ancestry forward from the indenture arrival to present-day relatives.

Open the per-country page below (Guyana, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, etc.) and use the Contribute flow at /contribute. Family papers, transcriptions, and leads on local-archive collections are what let us expand coverage. The contribute form also captures your email, so when per-person records for that country are indexed later, we can let you know.

Yes — indenture search is free on the Explorer plan, plus up to 15 family-tree members and unlimited record saving. Voter record cross-reference is a paid feature (Researcher plan and above). Historian (200 members) also adds origin-village matching.