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.

Besides adding more people, I've also included more information about the persons who were already in the database. I have now imported my own 'information' fields as well, which may include information about witnesses, land ownerships or other details. For many families, I have includes pages and pages of transcribed records. All of this additional information is in Dutch but since this database is being used by Dutch people as well I thought to include it anyway since it contains so much additional details.

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.

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.

Death records are a part of the civil registration. A death record lists the following data:

• Place, date and time of death
• Names of parents
• Names of spouses
• Name, profession and age of the one registering the birth
• Names, profession and age of the witnesses
• Often: address where the death took place

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

Gerrit Geerlings was a member of the Secession in the Netherlands and involved in the creation of many new Seceder churches. He emigrated to the United States together with his entire family of seven children. Unfortunately, they ended up on the vessel Phoenix which took them across the Great Lakes but perished off the shores of Sheboygan. The Geerlings family was one of the luckiest (or should we say, "least unlucky") families on board, because only two of the children were lost while most other families had perished entirely.

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.