The slides cover these topics:

• Different important sources
• Finding your immigrant ancestors
• Tips per province (Gelderland, Zeeland, Friesland: the 3 provinces where most Dutch people in Sheboygan come from)
• Using Genlias and WieWasWie
• Search tips

Enjoy!

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.

In the days before the Civil Registration forced everyone to stick to a surname, people in the eastern part of the Netherlands were named after the farm they lived at. You can still see that in the surnames today: Derk te Kolste, Piet te Lintum, Gerrit Jan Hoitink, etc. Since the surname might change every time a person moved, this sometimes offers difficulties in tracing your ancestors. There are some strategies to help you solve those name puzzles.

Birth records are a part of the civil registration. A birth record lists the following data:

• Place, date and time of birth
• Names of parents
• Name, profession and age of the one registering the birth (often the father)
• Names, profession and age of the witnesses
• Often: address where the birth took place

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

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.