To celebrate the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in New York State, there will be a conference about "Women In New Netherland." Organizer: New Netherland Institute Dates: 22-23 September 2017 Where: Albany, New York More information: Women in New Netherland Conference page … [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.
Quick tip – Talk to your oldest family members
6 September 2017 by 2 Comments
About ten years after I started doing genealogy, I was talking to my grandmother about her family. She asked me if I'd ever found out when her two aunts died. The last time she'd heard from them was about twenty years earlier, when they were in their 80s. In those days, I was focused on going back in time. I had blazed right through the 1900s and 1800s, back to the 1700s and 1600s where the research became more "interesting." No, I had not researched my great-grandmothers siblings in detail. … [Read more...]
How to Find Your Dutch Ancestor’s Occupation
1 September 2017 by 2 Comments
Do you want to know what your Dutch ancestor did for a living? Here are five different sources you can check to find out. Civil registration records The civil registration records of birth, marriage, and death will include the occupation of the adults in the records (parents, spouses, deceased). These records are available for the whole country since 1811, and since 1794/6 for parts of Limburg and Zeeland. Most of these records can be found online. Census records and population … [Read more...]
Quick tip – The parents in the death record may be wrong
30 August 2017 by 3 Comments
Civil registration records are generally reliable. They are created on the day itself or a few days afterward. But not all information in the record is of the same quality. In my experience, the information about the parents in a death record is the least reliable of all the information you can find in civil registration records. The informant is usually a neighbor, not a family member, who probably never knew the parents of the deceased. They may have misheard, or misremembered. They may … [Read more...]
How far did my ancestors move?
25 August 2017 by 12 Comments
When working with American, Canadian, and Australian genealogists, I am always struck by how their family stories are about migration. The most common question is where their ancestors came from. My ancestors did not move much. Most of them married a partner from the same area, and lived their wholes lives in the same towns. I never wondered were they came from. They were just there—probably for many generations before the start of surviving records. To visualize how far my ancestors … [Read more...]
Case study – Using Estate Inventories
18 August 2017 by 2 Comments
In Winterswijk, Gelderland in 1754, Jan Hendrik Hilbelink was a widower with four young children, who wanted to marry again. Before being allowed to do so, he had to come to an agreement with the guardians of his minor children. He made an estate inventory of all the possessions of him and his late wife, Aaltjen Vriesen. Their children would be entitled to her half. The inventory consists of the following items: 1 piece of farm land cooking tools (pots, baking trough, sifs) 2 … [Read more...]
Quick tip – Two New Netherland Articles Published
9 August 2017 by 5 Comments
Two of my clients published articles in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (April 2017 issue) for which they used research I did for them: Harry Macy, "Origin of the Amerman and Terhune Families, and their Founding Mother Geertje Dirks." This article includes research I did to identify the origins of Albert Terhune, patriarch of the New Netherland Terhune family. Adrian Burke, "A Note on Origins of Alexander Glen, Alias Sander Leendertz Glen, of Schenectady County, New … [Read more...]
Dutch Genealogy News for July 2017
4 August 2017 by 2 Comments
Here is an overview of new records and projects that were announced in the past month. Online Dutch Records Notarial records of the following municipalities in Friesland are now available via AlleFriezen, mainly for the 1920s and 1930s: St. Annaparochie, Balk, Beetsterzwaag, Bolsward, Drachten, Dronrijp, Franeker, Giekerk, Hardegarijp, Heerenveen, and Marrum. Zoekakten updated its links to FamilySearch with a range of links to scans of notarial records in Zeeland and Zuid-Holland. … [Read more...]
Quick tip – Where did the name come from?
2 August 2017 by Leave a Comment
When you hit a brick wall, it might be worthwhile to look at all the names in the family. Can you account for all the names of the children? Could one of them be named after a grandparent or former spouse? Last names can provide clues about a place of origin. Different suffixes in surnames point to different regions. A matching name does not amount to prove, but it is evidence we can use to guide our research and can help to build our case. See this article about Naming patterns for … [Read more...]
Column – Unnecessary
28 July 2017 by Leave a Comment
Many archival collections in the Netherlands have been cataloged in finding aids according to the principles of the nineteenth-century archivists Feith, Fruin, and Muller. Their Handleiding voor het ordenen en beschrijven van archieven [Manual for orderning and describing of archives] from 1898 states that a finding aid should merely provide an overview of the records, but should not discuss their contents. A finding aid should not make consulting the records unnecessary. A finding aid … [Read more...]
