First mentioned in the slave registers of Berbice dated 1 February 1819, her details are given as "Premiere, ½ year old, mother: Diena", which means she was born in July or August 1818.
Her mother, Diena, is registered as a 21-year-old black field worker, a slave belonging to the Dutchman Jan van der Woordt, who had been the first owner of the Woordtsburg plantation.
"A German soldier, August Kappler, who visited Balfour at Waterloo plantation in 1838, described him as an eccentric man ‘who had immeasurable wealth and was always working to obtain more’ but who, despite his success, lived ‘alone, without wife or children, except for a mulatto, who he fathered with one of his slaves’"[5][6] Born into slavery in the Dutch colony of Surinam, Harriët Balfour remained enslaved - even after the emancipation of slaves in the British colonies in 1834 - until her father died in 1841.
Her father's funeral consisted of a feast presided over by his corpse in a coffin, to which all significant people in Nickerie were invited.
[5] Once a year, the grave was opened and cleaned until Amir Sankar, the owner of Waterloo since 1936, ended the ceremony.