Dutch Ancestry Blog

Several years ago, I had the privilege to travel to Australia's Outback. I remember gazing at the stars on a pitch black night. It is virtually impossible today to find a spot in the Netherlands that gets that dark at night. Here, civilization is never far away and with it street lighting is neither. That makes it even harder to imagine that there indeed was a time that the Dutch night sky was as dark as that of the Australian Outback today. The reason for this was that there were no street lanterns. In the Middle Ages street lighting was an unheard of commodity. As a result, the nights were dangerous.In the dark it was easy to assault a traveler unseen, and rob him of his valuables. The dark also made it hard to distinguish between the road and the many swamps just beside it, hence getting lost or drowning were real dangers too. Thus the night was a scary time to be outside and people loved to frighten each other with awful stories by the fire about werewolves, vampires, evil elves and spirits that would lure you into the swaps and the like...

On a chilly morning on October 31, 1860, Johannes Nathan had a last look at the watery sun that just peeped through the clouds. Then the rope pushed his last breath out of his throat and everything went black. Was his last thought with his mother-in-law that he had beaten to death on the road to Sittard? We will never know. We do know, however, that he was the last person in the Netherlands to be sentenced to death (periods of war not included). The death penalty was abolished in 1870. However, up until 1860, death by hanging was a common penalty for capital offenses and for small offenses if you were of low class. The possibility of being hanged was even more frightening because of torture practices. If someone refused to confess, torture was applied. We now know that torture easily leads to false confessions to stop the pain, but in those days, that wisdom was not so common...

The National Dutch Archives probably host the largest collection historical documents of the Netherlands. It preserves the archives of the Dutch Government and those of social institutions or people that have been of any significance to Dutch history. Among a lot of other things they have an image bank that contain almost half a million pictures of historical places, people and documents. This is great material to illustrate a certain period or place related to your ancestors. And if one of your ancestors did anything significant to Dutch history you might even find pictures concerning them as well...

The other day I hopped in the car with my kids to pay a visit to grandpa and grandma in Holland's southernmost province of Limburg. The trip took us two hours on a smooth, well-lit highway. During the drive, my thoughts wandered off to my ancestors, as they regularly do. I wondered how they would have experienced this trip? My ancestors from the 1700s probably never made such a trip. They lived, married, and died in Amsterdam, possibly without ever setting a foot outside the city. Traveling to the south of Limburg at that time would have been a huge undertaking, especially if you lacked the money to get yourself a carriage, a horse, or a ticket on a "trekschuit" (horse-drawn barge)...