After World War II was over, many people wanted to start a new life across the ocean. Five years of war had destroyed the Dutch economy, and it would take years to recover. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many Dutch people emigrated to Australia, Canada and the United States.

Foreign soldiers and Dutch girls

Starting in September 1944, the allied forces had liberated parts of the Netherlands. It took until 5 May 1945 for the Germans to capitulate and the entire country was free again. The foreign solders, from countries like Poland, Canada, the United States, Great Brittain and Russia, were received very warmly. The Dutch girls were attracted to these brave men in uniforms. Many soldiers had Dutch girlfriends. Several of these romances led to lasting relationships.

Poster welcoming the allied forces

Several of these women found themselves with child, and tried to get in touch with the baby's father. Some of these unexpected fathers sent for their girlfriends and their babies. Other women bore their 'liberation children' alone, because they couldn't find the father or the father wouldn't recognize the child.

After the war was over, some of these soldiers arranged for their girlfriends to come to them. This happened so often, that the Dutch government made an arrangement with the Canadian government. Canada sent a ship to take the Dutch girlfriends of their soldiers, sometimes together with their Dutch-Canadian babies, to Canada.

Starting a better life

For others began the difficult task of rebuilding the country. The winter of 1944/1945 had been especially severe, and caused many problems in the parts of the Netherlands that had not been liberated yet. Everything that would burn was used for fuel, everything that could be traded for food was traded.

Even though the Marshall Plan helped to rebuild the country and create jobs, many people were unemployed. Through their contacts with their liberators, they knew things were different elsewhere in the World. Many people, especially young families, emigrated to countries such as Australia, Canada or the United States. An article about Dutch emigration to Australia can be found elsewhere on this site.

Advertisement for English lessons to prepare for emigration

The trip

Most of the emigrants who emigrated after World War II, left by ship from Rotterdam. The Holland-Amerika-Lijn, a Dutch shipping company, had ships that could transport as much as 2,000 passengers at once. A few years later, flights became affordable. This not only enabled new emigrants to get to their new country quicker, but also enabled the emigrants to visit their relatives in the Netherlands.

Links

• Polygon Journal: Canadian brides (real video)
  This Dutch news broadcast video shows the farewell of the Dutch girls who travel to Canada to be with their boyfriends. In Dutch, but the images speak for themselves.

I've just added a Dutch genealogy store to the site. In this store, visitors can buy books, DVDs and prints about Dutch genealogy, history and culture. I've selected publications that I think would benefit somebody researching his Dutch roots. The store is powered by Amazon. This website receives a commission for all sales, enabling this website to remain free.

In 2007, I wrote a guide on how to set up image banks. The aim of the guide is to share best practices in creating online access to collections of images.  

The project was an initiative of the Taskforce Digital Accessibility of Archives (Taskforce Archieven) in the Netherlands. We formed a project group, consisting of image bank specialist from several archives in the Netherlands. I was involved as project manager and author of the guide. 

The Dutch National Archives are involved in a project to share knowledge with their Croatian counterparts. As part of this program, the guide was translated into English and then into Croatian. I thought visitors of this website might also be interested in this guide, so I put the English version here as well. The guide is available under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to share the document with others.

Download 'Setting up an image bank' (PDF, 381 KB).

The Nationaal Archief, the National Archives of the Netherlands, has now joined Flickr the Commons. Like the Library of Congres, the Nationaal Archief is now using Flickr as a means to create wider access to the photo collection and ask the visitors for help in describing the collection. The first collections include a set of pictures of emigrants.

I've just updated the genealogical database. It now includes about 42,500 people and their families. This includes almost 3,200 emigrants from the eastern part of the Achterhoek who emigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century. This is just the tip of the iceberg and is by no means complete. I did enter all of the Winterswijk emigrants I could find in the period 1840-1880, often with their ancestors as well.

When Dutch people arrived in the United States or other English-speaking countries, often their names got changed. This was either done on purpose, to make the name easier to write and remember, or by accident because the clerk didn't know how to spell the name and wrote it down phonetically. For this reason, a single family name can often be found in many different spellings in different documents.

This article gives an overview of the types of changes that names underwent and also gives a list of English versions of Dutch last names. This list is not complete and even for the names that are listed, chances are that many people with those names used even more exotic variants as well.

The province of Noord-Brabant lies in the south of the Netherlands. It borders on Limburg to the east, the country of Belgium to the south, the province of Zeeland to the west and the provinces of Zuid-Holland, Utrecht and Gelderland to the north.

The capital city of Noord-Brabant is Den Bosch, also known as 's-Hertogenbosch. Other larger towns are:

• Breda
• Eindhoven
• Tilburg
• Roosendaal
• Oss

This article is about Dorcas A. Newhouse, originally Gerharda Aleida Nijenhuis, who came to America in 1847 on a sailboat that was shipwrecked. Dorcas survived and wrote a short memoir about her life when she was about 80 years old.

The first larger emigration wave from the Netherlands took place in the seventeenth century. A new colony was established in the Americas, which was called the New Netherlands. After a rough start, this colony attracted emigrants from all over Europe.