This is an overview of all the news about sources, websites, and archives that was announced last month.
Sources
- The historical society for northeast Friesland published the D.J. van der Meer collection with notes and indexes for various archival records in northeast Friesland on their website.
- Several transcriptions of court, tax, and church records from East-Gelderland have been added to Genealogiedomein.
- The website Kampen Notarieel publishes indexes and abstracts of notarial and court records of Kampen.
- Scans of Amsterdam city directories 1821-1940 are available at the Amsterdam City Archives.
- Various birth, marriage, and death records of Staphorst, Ambt Ommen, Kampen, Kamperveen, and IJsselmuiden in Overijssel from the 1900s have been indexed. The indexes can be consulted via Collectie Overijssel or Open Archives.
- Scans and indexes of birth records of Best, Dinteloord, Eersel, Eethen, Genderen en Heesbeen, Heeze, Heusden, Luykgestel, Maarheeze, Made en Drimmelen, and Terheijden in Noord-Brabant have been added to the Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum website.
- Municipal reports of Nijmegen 1851-1940 have been scanned and can be accessed via the Regionaal Archief Nijmegen.
- The minutes of meetings by the States of Zeeland, the provincial government, have been scanned and made full-text searchable. If you search the Archieven (archives) section of the Zeeuws Archief website, you will now see “gevonden bestand” [found file] if the term you search for is found within the text of the document.
States of Zeeland searchable minutes
Archives
- The National Archives released their handwritten text recognition software as open source. It comes with a trained model for Dutch manuscripts. The software can be downloaded from Github. The program uses artificial intelligence to automatically transcribe handwritten texts.
I have tried it out and managed to get it working under Linux. In its current state, it is not a consumer tool. Developers comfortable with Linux, Docker, Python, and shell scripts should be able to get it working. The availability of this software is a great development and I look forward to seeing how people use the software to make handwritten texts accessible. - The Brabant Collection in Tilburg has joined the #BrabantinBeelden project in which Brabant heritage organizations share knowledge about digitization and copyrights of Brabant audiovisual material. Several historic films were transferred to the Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum. See the website Brabant in Beelden for digitized audiovisual material from the collections of the participating organizations.
- The Rotterdam City Archives is renovating the reading room. There is a temporary reading room on the ground floor. Retrieving records may take longer and scanning options are limited. [Source: Rotterdam City Archives]
Projects
- The National Archives is doing a project to index records about forced laborers in World War II. All 200,000 documents have now been indexed. The archives is now verifying and cleaning the data. It will become available via the websites of the National Archives and Oorlogsbronnen later this year. [Source: NA]
- Prison records of Friesland are being indexed. Volunteers can now join the project at Vele Handen.
- The population registers of Barradeel and Franekeradeel in Friesland 1829-1940 are being indexed. Volunteers can join at Vele Handen.
- The heritage center for ‘s-Hertogenbosch is looking for volunteers to describe old postcards of ‘s-Hertogenbosch. Volunteers can sign up at the .
About Yvette Hoitink
