Hey everybody! Welcome back for another... "It's a quick genealogy tip". In today's
quick genealogy tip I'm going to be talking about researching in the
Netherlands. The Netherlands has tons of archives all throughout which hold
millions upon millions of records. Now what makes the Netherlands so amazing,
especially in today's day and age, is that a lot of it is online and even
better... It's FREE! The reason why all of these
digitized records are free is because the Netherlands actually passed a law
making it so that the public had free access to government records. The actual
law which, I'm going to post right here - I'm not gonna be able to pronounce the
Dutch version, but it basically translates to the law of reuse of
government information. Now there are limitations with this because some of
the archives have information on people who are living one of the interesting
thing is about the archives in the Netherlands is that they are so
expansive that when the Nazis were occupying the Netherlands they actually
used the records to find Jews and to also keep tabs on all of the population
because they could just go and look at the records it was such a big deal that
a group of artists bombed an archive which held people Vulkan registers which
is basically the population registers the census and it actually wasn't as
much as they thought they had destroyed but they destroyed just enough
information that they were able to save tons of lives and they were also able to
allow the resistance to become stronger now for this video I'm assuming most of
my viewers are coming from an English background but it should be able to help
out pretty much anybody who's looking in the Netherlands
now the first place I'd suggest to start is familysearch.org. Most people are
familiar with familysearch.org and it holds a ton of records from all over the
world but they hold a lot in the Netherlands as well. Now if you go to the
search records and you look at the bottom right you'll notice browse
collections and you'll actually see a search there. If you click browse
collections that'll pull up a page and on the left hand side you'll see another
listing and in that listing you'll find nano Europe and under that you'll be
able to find the Netherlands and there you'll be able to see all the
collections that they have now a lot of this is indexed so you can actually
search for it in their regular search but the majority of it is not indexed.
Now to give you an example Amsterdam is one of the number one places that
people research. When it comes to the Netherlands, it's a major city, and
Amsterdam is located in North Holland a family search has the civil registers
from Nord Holland which is about 6.6 million images and they have these
images digitized but of those only about five hundred and twenty-six thousand
have been indexed so you're looking at only 8 percent of the Nord Holland civil
register is indexed on family search now the next website I do want to talk about
is WieWasWie, which translate to "who was who?" and it is in Dutch, but if you notice
in the top right there is a selection for English. Not all of the website is in
English, so you may click on a link and then it's going to go back to Dutch. So
along with WieWasWie there's also openarch.nl - They have a lot of records
that you're going to find on some of these websites that are already talking
about especially on familysearch.org but what's interesting about openarch is
that they're trying to present the information so that it's not so boring
while also giving extra context to the information through different visuals.
and tools that they have available. A great example is when they present the
index information from a marriage record they're going to show the groom and the
bride and they're going to show the parents of the groom and the bride in a
way like a family tree they also try to help you out by linking on that page to
any documents that they believe are related to the document that you're
currently looking at. Now some of the cool features that they have on
Openarch are ones that I haven't really found anywhere else and they're really
interesting and how they present it. The first feature is a historical weather
tool so when you look at a document you can actually look at what the weather
was on that day now another feature and this one is going to be much more useful
is they have a historical it's feature so if you find an address
you can then look at a historical map from that time so you can see where that
location was now for anybody who is researching their ancestors specifically
in Amsterdam you need to check out the Amsterdam archives which are online now
that website is real easy it's just our Keith Amsterdam now some downsides for
our English speakers is it's all in Dutch and there is no feature for
English translation. The Amsterdam archives on the website are broken into
two sections; the first one is the inventories and the other section is the
index. The index is the first place to go it has a lot of great information these
are all also found in the inventories but these are the parts of the inventory
that have been indexed so you can actually search through them some of
these indexes have limits on the years that are indexed the entre registers end
in 1811 so if you have the ancestors who were married in 1813 you're gonna have
to go through other ways to find records on that marriage now going through the
inventories will be a whole nother video and in all honesty could probably be
split up into a dozen different videos because it is very expansive it has so
many different catalogues and then within those catalogs it has even more
catalog and even more and it's just it's ridiculous and this is literally all of
the inventories that they have at the Amsterdam city archives now not all of
these records in the inventories have been digitized yet but if there is
something that you find where you want to get those digitized you'll notice a
button that you can click that will allow you to request digitization and
they're scanning a lot they are doing a ton of work they're producing 15,000
scans a week thank you so much for checking out this video if you have any
questions for me please be sure to put them in the comments below. I'd like to
give a special thank you to Ton Tielen and Michael Waas for helping advise me in
the making of this video. If you enjoyed be sure to give it a thumbs up you can
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GeneaVlogger. I'm out!