This is the tenth post in a series about my possible line of descent from Eleanor of Aquitaine. In the first post, I explained how I discovered the possible line, and how I am going to verify it one generation at a time. In the last post, I proved that my fifth great-grandfather Hendrik Smulders was the son of Jan Smulders and Catharina Cleijberg. Jan Smulders, son of Petronella van Vlijmen Research into Jan's son Hendrik had already uncovered the marriage record of Jan Smulders and Catharina … [Read more...]
About this website
Creating a website like this is a fun activity. There are so many options, so many choices. What do visitors want? What do I want? In this blog I will describe some of the things I encounter in developing and maintaining this website.
Dutch Genealogy News for July 2018
10 August 2018 by Leave a Comment
Here is an overview of the new sources, projects, and news about archives that were announced last month. Online sources ZoekAkten, the website that provided easy waypoints to the Dutch records at FamilySearch, has been taken offline. The volunteer behind the website decided to pull the plug. The records themselves can still be found via the Netherlands page or via the Catalog at FamilySearch. Volunteers have indexed the "Oost-Indisch Boek," the military service records for soldiers in … [Read more...]
Quick tip – Last Name or Patronymic?
8 August 2018 by 2 Comments
If you're researching a family with a name like Jansen, Zwiers, or Pieterse, at one point you will find the original person for whom the name was not a hereditary last name but a patronymic derived from the father's name. My mother's name is Marijnissen. As a beginning genealogist, it took me a while to realize that the father of her brick wall ancestor wasn't called Marijnissen but had Marijnis as a first name. I found his father as Marinus Peeters. When dealing with such names before … [Read more...]
Quick tip – Find Reusable Images at the Cultural Heritage Service
1 August 2018 by Leave a Comment
The Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed [Cultureel Heritage Service] is a government organization that oversees the care for monuments, archaeology, and museums in the Netherlands. The service has an online image bank with a range of digital images: Photos of monuments and archaeological sites Maps and original indicator tables of the cadastral registration of 1832 Photos of collections of some museums. I often use this image bank to find photos of churches where my ancestors … [Read more...]
Column – Robot genealogist
27 July 2018 by Leave a Comment
For years, we've heard about arm chair genealogists; researchers who do their family trees from home without going to repositories. The suggestion that this can't be a good researcher is no longer valid, considering the wide variety of sources that are available online. New is the robot genealogist, a computer program that analyzes sources and draws its own conclusions. The hints that genealogy programs and websites give about possibly relevant sources can be seen as a first incarnation of … [Read more...]
Quick tip – Hiding under another name
25 July 2018 by 1 Comment
If your ancestors were from a small town and you can't find their parents, perhaps they're hiding under another name. There wasn't a great influx of new people in a small town, so don't automatically assume that people came from elsewhere if you can't find them. They could be hiding under a different farm name, or their last name could be a patronymic referring to the first name rather than the last name of the father. Or maybe they were the first in their family to use that particular name … [Read more...]
Was Eleanor of Aquitaine my Ancestor? Generation 8 – Hendrik Smulders
20 July 2018 by 6 Comments
This is the ninth post in a series about my possible line of descent from Eleanor of Aquitaine. In the first post, I explained how I discovered the possible line, and how I am going to verify it one generation at a time. In the last post, I proved that my fourth great-grandfather Laurens Smulders was the son of Hendrik Smulders. Hendrik Smulders, son of Jan Smulders In the last blog post, I briefly discussed the marriage and death record of Hendrik Smulders, who married in 1777 and died in … [Read more...]
What Dutch DNA Looks Like – 2018 edition
13 July 2018 by 50 Comments
In 2016, I wrote a blog post comparing the ethnicity predictions between the three largest providers of DNA tests. Since then, some companies have changed their algorithms and I've tested with two more companies. Time for an update! I've kept the original article as-is so we can compare how the predictions change over time. To recap, according to my tree, I'm mostly Dutch with a bit of German. DNA matches confirm that my tree is correct for the past several generations. I have some French … [Read more...]
Dutch Genealogy News for June 2018
6 July 2018 by 1 Comment
Here is an overview of the new sources, projects, and news about archives that were announced last month. Online sources An index and scans of the slave registers of Suriname from 1851-1863 were published at GahetNA. The index and scans from the period 1830-1851 will follow later this year. The website GenealogieDomein published several transcribed tax records from 1763 of different places in East-Gelderland. Scans of the notarial records of Haarlem from 1573 to 1842 were published … [Read more...]
Quick tip – The Legal Father May Not Have Been the Biological Father
4 July 2018 by 6 Comments
If a child is born out of wedlock, it is possible he or she was later legitimized when the mother married. Legally, the mother's husband would then be the father. But that doesn't mean he was the biological father. In these situations, there are several things you can do to verify if the legal father was also the biological father: You can compare timelines of the mother and the legal father to see if they were in the same place around the time of conception. You can research the … [Read more...]
