Dutch Genealogy News for September 2022

Here is an overview of all the new sources, news, and projects announced last month.

Sources

• 60,000 birth records from the Gouda region have been added to the Middle Holland Regional Archives website. The information is also available at Open Archives.
• Indexes of church records and notarial records for several towns in east North-Brabant have been added to the Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum website.
• Several records regarding the creation of the province of Flevoland have been added to the Flevolands Archief website.
• Newspapers for West-Friesland 1804-1949 have been added to the West-Fries Archief website.
• Transcriptions of various tax records from East-Gelderland have been added to Genealogiedomein.
• The oldest known recordings of Frisian languages (from 1927) have been digitized. The recordings show many different dialects of Frisian. They can be accessed via Archieven.nl.
• Medieval charters from Limburg are now available at a new website, Waarvan Akte. The first 40 of 450 charters from the 1200s are now available. Each charter has the image, an abstract, the Latin transcription, the Dutch translations. Tags for the people and places in the record make it possible to easily find related records.

Charter documenting a sale to the Saint Gerlach monastery, 25 January 1231. Credits: Waarvan Akte (public domain)

Websites

• The genealogical search engines of the Regionaal Archief Tilburg and the Brabants Historisch Informatie Centrum now offer geographic searches. When filtering by “plaats” [place] you can now select whether you want to search for that place only, or also in a radius of 5, 10, or 25 km (3, 6, and 15 miles).

Geographic search options at BHIC website

Projects

• The Amsterdam City Archives is making their entire collection full-text searchable. They will use Handwritten Text Recognition for manuscripts and Optical Character Recognition for typed records. They will start with the civil registration of Amsterdam 1811-1945. Other projects are already underway to transcribe notarial records. [Source: Amsterdam City Archives]
• Death records of North-Holland 1961-1970 are being indexed by volunteers at Vele Handen.
• Collectie Overijssel is scanning civil registration records from Overijssel, including the birth records 1913-1932, marriage records 1943-1956, marriage supplements 1933-1944, and death records 1961-1980, and some older previously unscanned civil registration records. They are also digitizing all the indexes of Overijssel church records from before 1811. The records are temporarily unavailable for consultation in the reading room. The scans will become available via the Collectie Overijssel website early 2023.
• Houses in Dokkum will be given their old names back. Before 1805, there were no street names and houses were known by their own names. A historian is working with a city development society to show the old names on the houses again. [Source: Historical society North-East Friesland, Facebook]
• The Surinamese plantation archives will be digitized. This collection of the Surinaams Museum have information about the management of the plantations and living conditions of enslaved persons in the 1800s. The scans will be available in 2024 in the reading room of the National Archives of the Netherlands and at the Surinaams Museum. [Source: International Heritage Cooperation]

Map of Commewijne and Cottoca rivers in the colony of Suriname. Credits: National Archives of the Netherlands (public domain)

Archives

• The National Archives of Curacao and the Netherlands have signed a memorandum of understanding. The archives will collaborate to scan records in Curacao and the Caribian Netherlands and these will be stored in a separate part of the digital repository. The scans will become available on the websites of both archives. [Source: NA]
• The renovation of the reading room of the Regional Archives of Tilburg is finished. The reading room is open again. [Source: RAT]
• The Regional Historical Center of Limburg is renovating their location in Maastricht. The reading room will be closed for the rest of the year. [Source: RHCL]
• The National Archives acquired several new collections, including records relating to the care of people from Ambon in the 1950s [record group 2.27.148], the Department of Agriculture 1995-2010 [record group 2.11.116], and the Mauritshuis museum [record group 2.14.130]. [Source: NA]

Arrival of people from Ambom on the Kota Inten, 1951. Credits: J. van Bilzen, collection National Archives (public domain)