Research

If you want to start your own research – perhaps give a school talk – you will find some useful tips on this page.

Research always starts with trying to find the facts, and there are various sources: national and regional archives and local museums often have a lot of facts available. Often you can get those for free, sometimes you need to register and get a pass of you need access more often.

There is also a lot of information available online, some museums and archives have put their inventory online. If you want to have a print of this, you can often have that for a small fee.

Most importantly, the starting point is almost always the people around you that have information. For example, if you want to research your family tree, ask your family: marriage records and birth certificates are a good starting point. Every municipality has these in their archive, which can be viewed for free.

Every person has a registration card in the archive and if someone died more than 10 years ago, these personal cards can be requested at the Centraal Bureau van de Genealogie. In this way, for example, I eventually found out the name of the NSB man, who accompanied the trip.

Besides that, I wrote a load of letters to people with a given surname in a certain region. Sometimes I would get a response back with information that helped me to follow the right track. It turned out that people who received such a letter would often ask around in their own family and in that way could help me.

And don't forget: research is a lot of work and you need to check everything you find because evidence is like easter eggs: 1 egg is no egg, 2 eggs is half an egg and only 3 eggs constitute a fact. In terms of research: a source is not a source, two independent sources provide reliable information but can contradict each other on small facts. Check these differences with a third source. In general, the government information on personal cards, for example, is correct, but the genealogy online is often wrong. You should check that information.

It remains for me to wish you a lot of success with your project. If you need more specific tips or if you have further questions, don't hesitate to mail me.