Online records: Noordhollandse Huwelijken

The website

So far, we have only looked at the websites of archives and museums in the Online records series. Today we will look at a private initiative: The website Noordhollandse Huwelijken (Marriages of Noord-Holland), maintained by Gertie van Lienen-Visser and Ineke Smit.

What do they have?

Reconstructions of families from several towns in the province Noord-Holland, originally based on marriage records that were entered in Genlias, later supplemented with other records found in the Noord-Holland archives (and occasionally records found elsewhere).

The towns you will find on Noordhollandse Huwelijken are Barsingerhorn, Beemster, Beverwijk, Broek op Langedijk, Harenkarspel, Hensbroek, Huizen, Katwoude, Muiden, Muiderberg, Nieuwe Niedorp, Oterleek, Oude Niedorp, Oudkarspel, Petten, De Rijp, Schagen, Sint Maarten, Sint Pancras, Twisk, Ursem, Veenhuizen, Velsen, Venhuizen, Warmenhuizen, Wieringen, Wieringerwaard, Wimmenum, Winkel, Zandvoort, Zeevang, and Zijpe.

Family reconstructions is the main focus of this website, but there is also a list of emigrants to North America, mostly from Sint Maarten, Schoorl, Zijpe and Warmenhuizen, and from the province Friesland.

Is there an English interface?

No. There is an English summary (click the British flag in the top left), but it's rather outdated. At the bottom of the English page is a small list of Dutch words (with translations) that you may need to understand the data on the website.

How do I use it?

Click on the name of the town you are interested in. On the next page, you have to click a letter to get a list of surnames starting with the selected letter. Click on a name to go to the family reconstruction.

For a few towns the site works differently. The link for Venhuizen, for instance, opens an index to the church books of Venhuizen.

If you want to consult the list of emigrants, click Emigranten on the homepage, or go directly to this page. Choose an initial at the bottom of the page to get a list of names, and click on a name.

How much does it cost?

Use of the website is free.

Future plans

New data is added regularly.

Conclusion

A useful website if your ancestors are from one of the featured towns. You will often find complete families on this site, and you can usually click through to the siblings' families, or to the parents' families. Note, though, that unmarried children are often missing, as the main source for this website is marriage acts.

An update of the English summary is long overdue. It would also be nice if the webmasters could do something about the popup ads.

Dutch archives news roundup - June 2007

News from the Dutch archives.

• Several Dutch archives have limited opening hours during July and August. Check their websites for details.
• The Drenthe Archive presented the book In de versnelling, about cars in Drenthe in the last 100 years. There is also an exposition on the same topic in the Drenthe Archive (until August).
• The Gelderland Archive announced a major overhaul of their website. The new website will launch in July. The archive also announced that one million Gelderland death acts are now indexed in Genlias.
• The National Archive announced a new website about Zuid-Holland history: www.geschiedenisvanzuidholland.nl, a cooperation of several institutions in Zuid-Holland. The new website seems to be available in Dutch only.
• It was already possible to search for gezinskaarten on the website of the Amsterdam Archive, but you can now also see the scans online. A great service if you have relatives in late-19th or early-20th century Amsterdam. This is a paid service: Searching the index is still free, but you have to pay to see scans.

Dutch archives news roundup - May 2007

News from the Dutch archives.

• The National Archives opened the archives of Ordedienst and Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten, Dutch resistance movements sponsored by the Dutch government in exile during the second world war. These can be consulted on site in The Hague.
• The National Archives have a vacancy for a new Director, as their current Director will retire at the end of this year.
• Over half of the car license plate registrations for Friesland from the period 1906-1950 are now available online. The rest will follow this year.
• The Amsterdam Archive opened a new and improved image bank.
• All birth acts from Rotterdam (1811-1902) are now available in their online database. Death acts will be next.
• The provinces Groningen, Noord-Brabant, Noord-Holland, Limburg and Zeeland have added new acts to Genlias.

Dutch archives news roundup - March 2007

• The National Archive announced the addition of records from the Netherlands antilles to the Genlias project. See my earlier post on this topic.
• The Amsterdam City Archive closed its doors on 30 March. They will spend the next few months moving to a new location. The new location will open to the public on 7 August.
• A researcher discovered a hand-written letter by Voltaire in the Friesland archive. It is the only known Voltaire letter that is written in Dutch.
• The Gelderland Archive discovered a 16th century album amoricum in a private collection that they have currently on loan. The album dates from before 1556 and is the oldest known Dutch album amoricum.
• The Noord-Holland archive completed their refurbishment and reopened on a new location.

The 1891 Hilversum phone book

The Dutch language section of my genealogy website contains several source transcriptions. I added a new transcription today: The 1891 Hilversum phone book. This is by far the smallest source transcription I have done: A mere four connections were listed.

To save you the trouble of wrestling through the Dutch information on my website I will repeat the phone book here (this is probably the first time the entire phone book of a Dutch city is published in a single blog post). Note that the phone numbers were only one digit long.

name            phone
Brandsma, E.    3
Town hall       4
Ledeboer, R.    6
Wassenaar, K.A. 2

Genealogy in Amsterdam

In an earlier post I discussed Genlias, the free, online, but still incomplete, index to the Dutch civil register.

You will not find any data from the three largest Dutch cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague) in Genlias. Rotterdam and The Hague maintain their own solutions and do not participate in Genlias (see my posts New website Rotterdam archives and Genealogy in The Hague).

Amsterdam will eventually add its civil register records to Genlias, but currently they are not available online. The Amsterdam municipal archive does offer several other databases on their genealogy website. The most important of these is the Doopregisters, baptism records, that cover the years 1564-1811. The interface is in Dutch. To search, click Doopregisters, then Zoek (Search) from the navigation menu on the right. In the search form, fill in first name, infix and surname at the boxes labelled Voor, tussen, Achter (leave blank what you don't need/know). Click Fuzzy if you also want to search for similar names. You can fill in a second name, if you want - you will only find records with both names on it. Limit the search to the period (Periode) you're interested in (startdate and enddate, both in the form day (D) month (M) year (J)). Press the button labelled Zoek (Search).

Hover over the names to see the full record. Click on a name to add it to your selection (you will be prompted to fill in your e-mail and to give your selection a name). If you have created a selection you will see the option Afsluiten (Finish) on the bottom right. Clicking it will close your selection. In the next screen, confirm you want to close your selection by clicking Ja (yes), or leave it open by clicking Nee (No). If you leave the option Geen mail sturen (Don't send e-mail) blank, your selection will be mailed to you. Check the option if you want to clear your selection without receiving an e-mail.

You may encounter the following Dutch words in your result set:

vader	father
moeder	mother
zoon	son
dochter	daughter
getuige, getuigen	witness, witnesses
pastor	priest, vicar, parson
doop	baptism
geboorte	birth
religie	religion
bron	source

There are many other databases and source transcriptions dealing with Amsterdam available on the internet. See Internet resources Noord-Holland for a complete list.

Links:

• Amsterdam municipal archive
• Genealogy website of the Amsterdam municipal archive
• Genlias
• Sources for Dutch genealogy research
• Understanding Dutch genealogy resources: A genealogy dictionary
• Internet resources Noord-Holland

My own Dutch roots: Hilversum

In an earlier post, I told you how we could see the tower of the St. Vitus church from my grandparents house, and showed you the house seen from this tower.

I also have a picture from the St. Vitus tower seen from my grandparents' house, probably taken in the 1940s.

My own Dutch roots: Hilversum

The annual Open Monumentendagen (Heritage Days) took place this weekend. During these days many historical sites (some 4000 in total) can be visited free of charge. A lot of these sites are usually not accessible to the public. This year I decided to use the Open Monumentendagen to trace my own Dutch roots and visited Hilversum, the town of my ancestors.

When I was a child, my grandparents lived some 100 meter from the Catholic St Vitus' church. In their house we heard the church bells every 15 minutes, and from the front room upstairs we had a good view of the tower and could read the time on the church clocks.

During my Hilversum trip I visited this church and climbed the tower, to search for my ancestors house (on my photo album, my grandparents' home is the house with the balcony on the Veerstraat; on the photo on the left it's one of the buildings at the top of the photo, behind the white buildings). And I saw the church bells I remember hearing so well (apparently there were five church bells, but a sixth has been added since).

Of course, I walked through the Veerstraat to have a look at my grandparents' former home. I haven't been inside since they sold it, nearly 30 years ago, but I walked past it once or twice before. It is now an office building, deserted in the weekend, so there was no chance to go inside. Other sites visited included the Dutch Reformed church, that I haven't visited since my grandfather's funeral in 1997 (he left Hilversum in the 1970s, but returned a year before his death).

The last part of my Hilversum trip was a guided tour through the town hall, an architectural masterpiece by W.M. Dudok.

Links: Open monumentendagen, photo album of my Hilversum trip, official website of Hilversum, ancestors of Hendrik van Kampen, Dudok on Wikipedia.