One of the great things about conducting Dutch genealogy is the amazing array of resources that are available. While the adage “not everything is online” still applies, there are an incredible number of sources that are digitized and online – largely for free! For this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge theme, I want to focus on two sources I have relied upon the most for newspaper articles.
One great thing about old Dutch newspapers is that they usually published summaries of all the birth, marriage, and death registrations for the local village or town civil registers (“burgerlijke stand”).
The first is Delphler.nl, a partnership between numerous Dutch libraries and archives – over 200 institutions, according to the website. It is a central access point for Dutch historical texts from the digital collections of numerous scientific institutions, libraries, and heritage institutions.
Delpher is somewhat like the Internet Archive. It is a repository for scanned images of newspapers, magazines, and books published in the Netherlands. It even includes some publications from its former colonies, such as Suriname. It boasts over two million newspapers, 400,000 magazines, and 200,000 historical books.
Delpher has a rather good search engine; I’ve rarely had difficulty finding what I am looking for. The results provide you a link to the full page of the document with your search term. The search result also allows you to go through every page of the paper or magazine containing the page you were looking for.
What might be a downside for most North American users is that the site is only available in Dutch. The translate function of your browser can help, although the records you’ll find will be in Dutch. Luckily, my Dutch is good enough that I can navigate and search without much difficulty. For what it’s worth, “kranten” is “newspapers” and “tijdschriften” is “magazines”. It’s probably not much of a guess to figure out “boeken” is “books”.
Another excellent source of newspaper images are the many local and regional archives throughout the Netherlands. I make use of several, particularly those situated in Leiden, Haarlem, and Alkmaar. Unlike Delpher, many Dutch archives have an English interface. However, some of them only provide English versions of part – but not all – of their website. Fortunately, the English interface is usually available for things like genealogy.
Alkmaar is very close to many of the towns and villages where my family has lived, so I have gathered a lot of newspaper images from the Alkmaar Archief. It has an online database exclusively devoted to newspaper images, Kranten Regionaal Archief Alkmaar (Alkmaar Regional Archives Newspapers).
Like Delpher, I find the Alkmaar Archief search engine works well. Like Delpher, the search result provides you with the full page of where your search term appears, with the ability to look at the entire newspaper that contains the page. However, unlike the main Alkmaar Archief, this database does not have an English interface.
I have had a great deal of success with the Kranten Regionaal Archief Alkmaar. Here are the clippings from the papers with the summaries of the birth registrations of my paternal grandparents:
Schager Courant, 11 April 1923, page 8.
(“Gemeente” is akin to a municipal district)
Alkmaarsche Courant, September 10, 1923, page 6.
A Deck of Ancestors 