Thousands of people from the Achterhoek and Zeeland emigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century. One of the descendants of that emigration wave, Mary Risseeuw, is going back to her roots for a while. She'll be in the Netherlands for a couple of weeks to research her Dutch ancestors together her distant cousin Yvette Hoitink (that would be me).

We'll also take this opportunity to give lectures together about the Dutch emigration to the US in the nineteenth century in two different libraries: the Winterswijk library and the Oostburg library.

Emigrant letters are a great source for information about the pioneer generation. Yesterday, I asked for emigrant letters on a newsgroup. Already, I've received two letters that were not widely known yet.

This week I read an interesting book: The island at the center of the world: the epic story of Dutch Manhattan and the forgotten colony that shaped America. It gives a new perspective on the Dutch contribution to the American society as we know it today.

At this moment, there's a poll on this website to see which province the ancestors of our visitors come from. To my surprise, Limburg is in the lead! Perhaps because my own research is focused on Dutch Reformed regions, I had never realized that many people emigrated from the catholic region of Limburg as well.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Benelux newsgroup for genealogy: soc.genealogy.benelux. I was one of the people who voted in favor of that group all those years ago. What began as a small group dominated by Americans with Dutch roots, is now a thriving online community where the majority of members are actually from the Benelux countries.

Whenever I research emigrant families, I'm amazed by the distances that they travelled. People who previously probably hadn't even left their province yet, ended up circumventing half the globe. Sometimes it didn't stop there, and after a few years they packed up and moved again.

When surfing the internet, I discovered some great image databases with early images of New York City. For most of the emigrants from the Netherlands that went to the United States, New York was their first meeting with their new home. These online resources offer a nice glimpse into their world.

Today I found out that Frank Schruis passed away last Thursday. As I'm writing this article, he will be burried in Clymer, NY. Frank Schruis was a well-known genealogist whom I met in 1997 when I visited Clymer.

'Twisted dough in Dutch' was one of the many search terms I found when going through the statistics of this website. I started wondering how someone who wants to know what 'twisted dough' is in Dutch would end up on this website.

On May 5th we celebrate the end of World War II and the liberation by the allied forces. This year the celebrations are especially large since it is the 60th anniversary.