If you cannot find your ancestor from the Netherlands, here are five strategies for you.
1. Reanalyze what you have
My first tip is to reanalyze what you already have. Take the time to go through every record and see if there is more evidence hiding in there. I have often found that when I do that, I come up with new ideas for further research, or I discover indirect evidence that I missed the first time.
2. Find out what other sources exist for the time and place
The next strategy is to understand what sources are available for the time and place where your ancestor lived and do more research. Here are some suggestions for the types of sources that are available for different periods:
You should also check the finding aids and catalogs of archives that keep the records for the area where they lived. See which archive keep the records of your ancestors.
3. Research their network
If you cannot find more information about your ancestor, try finding out more about their children, spouses, neighbors and other associates. For example, the marriage supplements of children may have abstracts of their parents’ or grandparents’ death records. Or you may be able to find a misindexed land record for your ancestors because the owner of a neighboring property was indexed correctly.
4. Trace their property
People typically owned property because they bought it or because they inherited it. If you cannot find a purchase record, try finding out who the previous owner was. That may well have been a relative, perhaps even the parents. That is one technique I used in my case study of Griete Smit that was published in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.
Undated map of the Andel polder. Credits: Nationaal Archief (public domain)
5. Consider name changes
Before the introduction of the civil registration (1811 in most parts of the Netherlands), there were no laws that governed surnames. Different regions had different traditions. People may have gone by their patronymics or by the name of the farm they lived on. Or they may have adopted a (different) last name when they moved, perhaps adopting a “van” [from] name to denote their place of origin. They would not have used that name before they moved, where that would not be a distinguishing characteristic. If they were Catholic, their church records may have used the Latin versions of their names, like Petrus instead of Pieter or Aleidis instead of Aaltje.
My mother’s last name is Marijnissen. For several years, we were stuck on her ancestor Johannes Marijnissen, who lived in Chaam in Brabant in the late 1600s. It was not until I realized that he may have been the first Marijnissen that we were able to find his baptismal record. His father was Marinus Peters, not a Marijnissen. His son adopted the patronymic Marijnissen—son of Marinus—and it stuck.
About Yvette Hoitink
