This website aims to be accessible for all users, including people with disabilities. To ensure this, we conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines level A and most of level AA as well.

Accessibility features

This website has the following accessibility features that you can use:

• The font size is defined in such a way that you can easily change it in your browser. In Internet Explorer, choose your preferred font size in the View menu. In Firefox, Mozilla and Opera, use <CTRL>-<+> or <CTRL>-<-> to increase or decrease the font size.
• The content has been designed to interact with screen readers. Screen readers are mainly used by people with visual impairments or by people with dyslexia.
  To be able to use the website in a screen reader, all images have been given alternative texts. Also, when you first enter a page using a screen reader, you will hear a link 'Go directly to content' that lets you bypass the navigation so you don't have to hear that every time.

Known accessibility issues

Although we try to make this website as accessible as possible, there are some known issues. Our content management system has some in-built choices that limit accessibility. 

Known issues with the accessibility of this website:

• The blog-type sections of the website use 'read more' links to link to the rest of the articles. These link texts are too generic to be of any use to identify which article is referenced. To work around this problem, we also link the titles of the articles so the read more links are redundant and can be ignored.
• The content management system uses tables for layout. The header of a panel is marked up using a header cell, even though header cells should only be used in data tables and not in layout tables. This can interfere with the way screen readers handle tables.
  
• The forms in the website do not have labels associated with the input fields. This makes it harder to know the meaning of the fields for people using screenreaders or braille displays.
• External links are opened in a new window without prior warnings which can be confusing for people with visual impairments or learning disabilities.
• The titles of articles are not marked up as headers, which makes it harder for people who use screen readers or braille displays to orient themselves within the content.
  
• No accesskeys are defined for the main links in the website. Accesskeys would make this site easier to use for people using keyboard navigation but unfortunately the content management system does not allow defining accesskeys.
  

Problems or suggestions?

If you experience problems with the use of this website or have a suggestion to improve the accessibility, please contact us and we will try to do our best to solve them.

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.

Personal information cards were used from 1938 to keep track of who lived where. It is a part of the population registration.

Personal index cards are a great source of information for recent research because they cover the period from 1938 onwards. Copies of personal index cards of deceased people can be ordered for a fee.

Gelderland is a province in the east of the Netherlands. It borders on Germany to the east, Overijssel, Flevoland and Utrecht to the north, Noord-Brabant to the south and Zuid-Holland and Utrecht to the west.

The capital city of Gelderland is Arnhem. Other large towns are:

• Nijmegen
• Apeldoorn
• Zutphen
• Doetinchem
• Tiel

One group of emigrants in the 18th century is known as the Pennsylvania Dutch. But did you know they weren't Dutch at all? Most Pennsylvania dutch are actually German or Swiss. But even though their ancestors were not from the Netherlands, many Pennsylvania Dutch used Dutch ports to travel to the United States so there is a Dutch connection.