This year, I am celebrating my twenty-fifth anniversary as a genealogist. During this time, we saw the change from paper to digital. Will we see as many changes in the next twenty-five years? Here are my predictions for genealogy in 2041. In the future, it will not be possible to visit an archive in person anymore. The most popular sources are available online. The originals are stored in a central repository; separate archives have been eliminated to save costs. If you want to … [Read more...]
Column: Receipt
29 April 2016 by 1 Comment
The receipt of the Teeven deal had been preserved: we could reconstruct how much money had been paid; even fifteen years after the fact. The drama that followed demonstrated that archiving is more than just preserving things well; it is also a matter of being able to find information again.* In the Netherlands, the national government has a digital repository, a joint service where archives and government agencies can store their digital information. This system has been built over the last … [Read more...]
Column – Reuse
15 January 2016 by 1 Comment
Since 18 July 2015, the Netherlands has a law to regulate the reuse of government information. The law is intended to give an impulse to the economy if government information is used as fuel for new products and services. The law requires archives to cooperate in the reuse of government information. They can only charge the marginal costs for providing copies of the information. Costs that have been made to create the information may not be recouped. Digitized records fall within the … [Read more...]
Column: Citizen archivist
4 October 2013 by Leave a Comment
Citizen archivists is a term coined by David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, to call a new breed of users of archives. Visitors who not only come to take information, but bring it as well. Visitors who help to create access to archives by contributing in the form of comments, transcripts or tags. The benefits to the archives are clear, but why would visitors even bother? Let's take me as an example. Whenever I find a Dutch immigrant on Ancestry with a hopelessly mangled name, I … [Read more...]
Column: virtual repository
2 August 2013 by Leave a Comment
"If you go back far enough, everybody is related," is a common quote when you tell people you're into genealogy . That is certainly the case with my father's side of the family tree. I started researching my ancestors over twenty years ago. Pretty soon, I discovered that my paternal grandparents, both from Winterswijk, shared multiple ancestors. Bit by bit, my tree grew from an ahnentafel to a population reconstruction of the entire region. … [Read more...]
Column: land movers
6 July 2013 by Leave a Comment
In the nineteenth century, thousands of people emigrated from the area around Winterswijk to the United States. "Land movers", they were called. Some left because of their religion, most in the hope of a better future. Among them there were several siblings of ancestors of mine. Curious what happened to them, I contacted their offspring on the internet. What began as a simple question ('What happened to Gerrit Jan Droppers') quickly turned into several long contacts and one of the closest … [Read more...]
