People who move a long way from their small village will often claim a larger city in the area as their place of birth since nobody would have heard of their real place of birth. If you can’t find your ancestor in the city where he was supposed to be born, try looking in the villages around there.
This is especially true after immigration. Many people just listed ‘Rotterdam’ or ‘Amsterdam’ as place of birth since those were the best known places in the new country. You may be counting yourself lucky to find something more specific than ‘Holland’ but you might still need to do some more digging to find the exact place of origin.
Map of Amsterdam. Frederik de Wit, 1688. Credits: Wikipedia
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