Liz, You have it exacxtly right. The existing lists are only of people who owed the WIC money for their passage, or who were employees of the company and their passage was an internal company expense. Most people had to pay up front for their passage, and so are not listed. Unfortunately, there are no archives in the Netherlands to check. Long ago some overeager workers got into the wrong part of a warehouse and all the WIC records pertaining to New Netherland ended up as pulp at a paper mill. The surviving records concern the company's colony in Brazil. Peter ----- Original Message ----- From: "E Johnson" <iris.gates@gmail.com> To: <dutch-colonies@rootsweb.com> Sent: Friday, March 23, 2007 3:26 AM Subject: Re: [DUTCH-COLONIES] Who paid for passage? > Did Terry mean that someone (not the Company but an individual) had paid > the > passage of certain persons, who then must be paid back through the > person's > work or earnings once they arrived here? Such as, an individual here who > hired someone from the Netherlands to come work. > > Also, I just wanted to comment that there may be many persons whose names > do > not appear on lists here, because they would have paid their passage up > front, just as we do today. Those names may exist on lists buried in > archives or family memorabilia in the Netherlands, or may be long-gone by > now. But clearly the ships lists that exist or have been reconstucted from > records don't account for the number of individuals here in the NN > colonies. > > Liz J > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > DUTCH-COLONIES-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without > the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >