One of the records I have come across is Hendrik Grivel ( - ), in relationship to the area of the Dutch West Indies, in the 18th century. So far I have seen the following pieces:
Thanks for responding. I am going through some old mortgages related to Berbice that I found in The National Archives in London (formerly PRO at Kew). Constantia showed up there and I googled a bit to see if her ancestry was somewhere documented. The Amsterdam marriage does not surprise me as many of the colonists there were Dutch or Huguenots who had at some point fled from France and settled in Amsterdam.
It looks like Constantia did not have children. In the notarial act there is talk of her leaving a bequest to her brothers and sisters in the vicinity of Luzern. Henry or Hendrik Grivel probably died around 1746 and she Constantia is his only heiress, his legacy including the plantation Zwitserland or Switzerland. I do not know if she left Berbice and settled elsewhere or whether she died in Berbice. Hendrik however, had a daughter, which Constantie refers to as his “voordochter”, meaning a daughter from another relationship before she Constantia married Grivel. Given the mores in Berbice in those days, it is also possible that she is using the expression as a euphemism for a daughter Grivel had with another woman in Berbice, possibly an enslaved person. The peculiar thing is that the daughter is not an heir of Grivel, although she bears his name, but she would be an heir if she was a (legitimate) daughter from his first or second marriage.
Possibly Henry and Constantie both spoke French and little or passing Dutch. From the marks Constantia places on the act, one gets the impression that she was semi-literate and the act states that is was read to her in French.