Tracing history

Living abroad is not only a great way to learn about other cultures, it also teaches you a lot about yourself and your own culture. After living outside of the Netherlands for over 5 years now (in Germany and Korea mostly and briefly in the USA, Japan and Singapore) my knowledge of Dutch customs and history grew substantially. Part of this is because people frequently ask about it, which led me to deep dive into the history of the Netherlands.

One thing I learned (or rather, did not know all the details of) is that Frisia, the province where my mother’s side of the family is from, was a separate country until not too long ago and spread across the northern part of the Netherlands (including Groningen, my birthplace), Ost Friesland and Schleswig-Hollstein in Germany and the southern tip of Denmark. 

Map of Frisia about 500 years ago. Frisia was a separate country or political entity much throughout the middle ages, until present day Friesland and Groningen were finally absorbed into the Netherlands around 1500.

(source: Wikipedia)

Frisia (the current province and the old country) also has its own language, making it one of the two official languages of the Netherlands (something most foreigners do not know).  Both Dutch and Frisian are Germanic languages and are closely related to languages like German, English, Norwegian and Danish. Although I do not speak Frisian fluently, I can generally understand it, as my mom’s side of the family speaks this and I grew up hearing it a lot. 

Languages

My deep dive into history also led me to explore some history of languages. Interestingly, linguists developed techniques to reconstruct what languages used to sound like hundreds of years ago, for example what English sounded like in the 1400s.

Modern day English is a mixture of old Norse and French. The first ingredient was brought to England by the Danish vikings during their raids and subsequent colonisation of the island. The second was ironically also brought by the vikings, after they raided and settled in Normany in France and then raided and settled in England again.

Since Dutch and Frisian are also closely related to old Norse and proto-germanic, my knowledge of those two languages makes it fairly easy for me to understand reconstructed old English, as spoken and written in this video. Surprisingly, modern Dutch/Frissian looks closer to me to old than to modern English and as a result, old English was easier for me to follow than for speakers of American and Australian English dialects.

Personal history

Except for my country's history, I also became curious about my personal heritage. It turns out there are some advantages to the Dutch obsession with bureaucracy and organising things, as there are some great websites for this, maintained by our government:

• Allegroningers containing the digitised civil records up to about 1800 of Groningen, the province where I was born. This includes things like birth certificates (see image below), death certificates and marriage certificates.

• Allefriezen with the same as the above, except for inhabitants of Frisia

• Open archieven which links many national archives, has an English version and also contains links to the website below and the Flemish archives (the Dutch speaking Northen part of Belgium, which used to be part of The Netherlands until 1830)

I assume these arc digitised using artificial intelligence tools like handwritten character recognition, as it seems Herculean to do that manually. Additionally, its challenging to even read those old documents because grammar, words and handwriting styles changed over the last 150 years.

Using the above three websites and one more source called Geneologie Online, where people who went deeper into the archives (beyond civil archives, like church records, books, etc) uploaded their familiy tree, I could trace some ancestors (name + place of birth + profession) as far back as the 1600s.

My family history is some of the most unexotic of everyone I know. Many of my friends seem to have some Indonesian, Southern Dutch, Spanish or German ancestry. In my case, pretty much all my ancestors are from northern Netherlands, either Eastern Frisia or an area close to the German border in Groningen. No royalty to be found anywhere.

A small part of a birth certificate from 1855 of one of my great great great grandparents.

Finding tombs

The adventure does not end at digital archives. Graves are also registered online on the somewhat morbid website called graftombe.nl (The Dutch word for tombstone), which I initially though was selling tombstones, but is actually a registry of all the graves in the Netherlands.

Using my earlier discovered names and places of birth of my ancestors, I could look up the exact graveyards where my ancestors were buried. Many graves still seem to be there and some were not too far away from my parents house.

The Groninger landscape on my bike ried to the graveyard.

On a recent trip home in June, I decided to explore those the Dutch way and took a long bike ride through ‘t Hoogeland (the Groninger country side). I left in the early evening to avoid some of the heat that day and finally pulled up at an old graveyard, around 21:30PM, about 2 hours biking outside of Groningen city.

It was a small graveyard on the outskirts of a town of about 100 people. I looked for the name of my great great grandma, which was on the website. Some of the tombs were so old that the text had faded and were impossible to read and I prepared myself for disappointment: even if I could read the text, the website might just be wrong or the grave may have been demolished. All the way at the back, I finally read a familiar name: Kooi. It turns out her husband, by great great grandpa was buried next to her in a surprisingly well-maintained grave.

One of the graves I found when diving into family history. They were burried next to eachother, the last one died in 1935. The grave is surprisingly well maintained, considering all close family passed away decades ago.

According to graftombe.nl, this is not even the oldest grave still around. I managed to dig up (no pun intended) the location of the grave of the mother of this ‘Kooi’, who died late 1800s. A nice adventure for my next travel home and through its history.