Jacob Kuyper (1821-1908) was a Dutch geographer and cartographer that did pioneering work on Dutch cartography. He co-founded the Royal Dutch Geographical Society in 1873. This society's primary mission was to explore and map uncharted colonial territories. Kuyper's biggest achievement, however, does not lie in the mapping of Dutch colonies but in the maps he drew for all 1200 municipalities of the Netherlands between 1865 and 1870.

The maps were published in 1871 by the Frisian publisher Hugo Suringar under the title "Gemeente-atlas van Nederland (Municipality Atlas of the Netherlands) and has become known as the Kuyper Atlas.

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 was indeed a time that the Dutch night sky was as dark as that of the Australian Outback today. The reason for this was the absence of street lanterns. In the Middle Ages, street lighting was an unheard of commodity.

Inspired by a family tree I recently completed for a client, I'd like to share with you a special kind of surname you may come across and that is both a blessing and a curse: surnames based on farm names. If you have been researching your roots for some time, then you may be familiar with the shift from "fixed surnames" to "patronymics", usually as you step back from the 1800s into the 1700s. All of a sudden —it seems— your ancestors shift surnames with each generation.

In the Netherlands, after 1811, all Dutch adopted a fixed surname, as imposed by Napoleon in that year. Before that, many people were named after their father. And so Pieter, son of Willem was called Pieter Willems and Jan, son of Pieter Jan Pieters, etcetera. A bit confusing when first researching such patronymics, but once you get the hang of it they are pretty straightforward and often a great tool when doing research in a time when records are less informative.

The Dutch are famous for their yellow clogs. Centuries ago, it was indeed the most popular footwear in The Netherlands. This was mainly because it was the most sensible footwear imaginable in a land that mainly consists of swampy, muddy soil. Only people in the cities with paved roads would venture out on leather shoes. Anywhere else wearing leather shoes was the best way to either get your feet soaked in minutes or break your neck on the slippery mud puddles.

Clogs had many advantages over shoes. They kept your feet cool in summer and, with a little straw in them, warm in winter. They gave you grip on slippery surfaces and above all kept your feet dry. No wonder people wore them all the time. There were many different types according to the region and their function. There were working clogs, wedding clogs, church clogs, everyday clogs, mourning clogs, etcetera.