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.

The presentation starts with an introduction about this emigration wave, and uses Mary's own ancestors Hubrecht Risseuw and Sara Willemina Bril as an example of the emigration from Zeeland. The next part discusses emigration from the Achterhoek and how studying the migration patterns can help find individual emigrants. 

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.

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

Zeeland is a province in the south-west of the Netherlands. It borders on Noord-Brabant in the east, the country of Belgium in the south, the North Sea in the west and Zuid-Holland in the north.

The capital of Zeeland is Middelburg. Other larger towns are:

• Vlissingen
• Goes
• Terneuzen

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.