One thing that annoys me in genealogy research is the focus on parent-child relationships to build a family tree. There are many more types of ties: neighbors or coworkers, for instance, or friends (and foes!). As these things go, curiosity got the better of me: what if I were to create a “family tree” using…
As a student, I loved going to antiquarians in the hopes of finding photos of people I could potentially identify. Today, I still have a small stack of old photos laying around, and this holiday period seems like a good moment to start where I once left of: who were those people, and can these…
As Y-DNA and mtDNA do not recombine and only mutate, these mutations can be used to link people who share the same mutations into haplogroups – meaning that these people share a direct paternal or direct maternal ancestor in the last centuries or even millennia. Combining information on the locations of the earliest known ancestors…
Census results are one of the main sources used to analyse the population in a certain area. Within the Netherlands, aggregated Dutch census results can be found online. Personally, I love this easy access to 19th century data – it helps me in contextualizing a lot of my findings. For instance, the published data on…
Church books are an important resource in researching Dutch citizens before the introduction of civil registration. As a result, many of these church books are available online, along with indexes to all entries. However, the Roman Catholic church books of Diemen, a town nearby Amsterdam, were not. Having used indexes made by many other people…
As people inherit random parts of their fathers’ and mothers’ DNA, they will not inherit the same length of DNA of each grandparent. When multiple generations pass, it becomes more and more difficult to predict how much DNA a person and their ancestor share – and if they even share DNA at all (which would…
Dutch naming traditions can be both your greatest friend and foe when researching historic populations. As couples named their children after their parents, this often meant several nephews and nieces shared the same first names. It also means that if you somehow end up with a father that shares his first name with his son,…
In November I started with a new job, a PhD at the Netherlands Demographical Institute (NIDI). Hermen Hermens Boschman, my mothers’ mothers’ mothers’ mothers’ fathers’ mothers mothers’ father, made a similar fresh start during the early 18th century. As the documents I recently uncovered in the archives match my current life very well, this seems…
Every now and then, I buy old photographs that have enough information on the back to potentially identify the person on that photograph. As it’s more useful to put those out there than keep them in a drawer, that’s what I want to do. In this series, I want to identify who the person on…
Whereas it might be difficult to split other countries into smaller regions, the Netherlands are neatly split into NUTS 2 regions (provinces) and NUTS 3 regions (COROP areas), which makes it easier for researchers to compare different parts of the country. In other countries such regions are not available, which poses a challenge to researchers:…