The province of Limburg is situated in the south-east of the Netherlands. The province borders Germany to the east, Belgium to the south, Belgium and Noord-Brabant to the east and Noord-Brabant to the north.

The capital city of Limburg is Maastricht. Other larger towns are:

• Heerlen
• Sittard
• Venlo
• Geleen

Genealogy in Limburg

Many people in Limburg used fixed family names long before the introduction of the civil registration which makes research easier. Most Limburg records are kept by the Limburg regional historical center. Unfortunately, the website is available in Dutch only.

Many marriage records from Limburg can be found in Genlias.

Emigration from Limburg

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Limburg was a poor region. People moved to urban areas or left the country to work in nearby Belgium or Germany or even to emigrate to the United States. Because of the American Homestead act of 1862, the peak of the Limburg emigration was in 1863. The people of Limburg were predominantly catholic and settled mainly in catholic regions of Minnesota. For more information about emigration from Limburg, see the Limburg emigrant page.

Online images

Images of Limburg can be found in several online resources:

• Image database of Limburg. This collection contains drawings, etchings, photographs, glass negatives, etc. Type the name of the person you're looking for in the textbox and press 'Zoek' (search).
• Limburg provincial atlas 1865-1870. This atlas contains both a map of the entire province as maps of the municipalities.

Map of Limburg

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

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

After World War II was over, many people wanted to start a new life across the ocean. Five years of war had destroyed the Dutch economy, and it would take years to recover. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many Dutch people emigrated to Australia, Canada and the United States.