On occasion of the conference The Dutch-American Experience in Wisconsin: 1840-present which is taken place today I thought I write a post about some sources that are available for researching your Dutch immigrant ancestors in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin resources

• Census records, civil war records and other enlistment records are available at Ancestry.com ($).
• Some census records have been transcribed by the Census Project.
  
• Wisconsin Land records are available at Rootsweb.
• Background information can be found at the Wisconsin Historical Society. They have an amazing archive of articles and a photo collection on Flickr.
  
• Misc. sources are available at the Wisconsin Genweb Project website.
• Records of Sheboygan and other places where the Dutch settled in Wisconsin can be found by visiting the reading room of the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center.
  

Resources on Flickr

• Ads of the Nieuwsbode, a Dutch newspaper in Wisconsin the 1850s and 1860s, which had lots of announcements of marriages of Dutch immigrants.
  

  www.flickr.com

• Some naturalization records of Dutchmen in Wisconsin, a more complete selection can be found at the SCHRC reading room.
  

  www.flickr.com

• Some marriages of Dutch in Milwaukee.

  www.flickr.com

• Photographs of graves of Dutch immigrants in Sheboygan.
  

  www.flickr.com

Dutch resources

Related articles

• Dutch in Wisconsin conference
• Q&A about 'From Winterswijk to Wisconsin'
  

Last week, my friend Mary Risseeuw from Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin and I gave a presentation at the International Congress for genealogical and heraldic Sciences in Maastricht. The title was "We're all fresh and healthy. Emigration from the Netherlands to the United States in the 19th century. The slides are now available online.

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.

Many Dutch family names have prefixes like 'de' or 'van'. They have a special role in the Dutch family name which you have to be aware of when researching names with prefixes.

Census records can be a great source of information because they list all the inhabitants of a house, usually one or more families together with their domestic staff. Since 1850, the Dutch census records form a continuous registration where you can find who lived where at all times.

Drenthe is a province in the north of the Netherlands. It borders on the province of Groningen in the North, Germany in the east, Overijssel in the south and Friesland in the west.

The capital city of Drenthe is Assen. Other large towns are:

• Emmen
• Hoogeveen
• Meppel

Jan Hendrik Warnshuis, brother of Hendrik Jan Warnshuis, was not at all like that brother. He was an upright, God-fearing, conservative leader in the church in Clymer. I have also concluded that he didn't have much of a sense of humor. He was Dominie Dunnewold's right-hand man and was a leader in keeping order among the congregation. He made home visitations with the dominie and, on occasion, substituted in the pulpit for him. Sometimes he read a sermon, sometimes he preached one of his own. It has been said that the congregation greatly preferred to hear him preach rather than read because he wasn't a very good reader.

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.