With the addition of 29 million new, free, historical records from the Netherlands,
FamilySearch.org now has over 65 million images and indexes from the Netherlands. Quoting from the above press release:
The freely searchable collections are comprised of birth, baptism, marriage, death, church, notarial, army service and passenger list records and population registers. Some of the records date back to 1564. Considering the population of the Netherlands is 17 million people today, the size of these collections makes it highly likely family historians will find the ancestors they’re seeking.
The breadth of record types now available provide a fantastic opportunity to learn more about a Dutch ancestor’s life.
There are also 12 free learning courses to help those searching Dutch ancestry and online volunteer indexing projects to make additional Netherlands records freely accessible.
As we have discovered, my wife and I both have some relatives in the distant past from the Netherlands. These records enable us to do research in this area.
Posts
Firstly, I can't see this update on FS's list of update historical record collections. However judging on past experience most of these records will be in the collections "Netherlands, Archival Indexes" (Public Records, Population Registers and Vital Records). These records are taken from the website OpenArch, which in turn gets their information as Open Data from the archives of various provinces, regions and cities from the Netherlands. The archives already have their own websites with this information and there is also the site WieWasWie, in addition to OpenArch. Some (maybe 1 million) of the 29 million are from FS Indexing Amsterdam births and deaths, and these are newly indexed and not available elsewhere. But the other records are not "new" at all.
ReplyDelete