As a student, I loved going to antiquarians in the hopes of finding photos of people I could potentially identify. Today, I still have a small stack of old photos laying around, and this holiday period seems like a good moment to start where I once left of: who were those people, and can these…
Tag: Genealogy
As people inherit random parts of their fathers’ and mothers’ DNA, they will not inherit the same length of DNA of each grandparent. When multiple generations pass, it becomes more and more difficult to predict how much DNA a person and their ancestor share – and if they even share DNA at all (which would…
Dutch naming traditions can be both your greatest friend and foe when researching historic populations. As couples named their children after their parents, this often meant several nephews and nieces shared the same first names. It also means that if you somehow end up with a father that shares his first name with his son,…
In November I started with a new job, a PhD at the Netherlands Demographical Institute (NIDI). Hermen Hermens Boschman, my mothers’ mothers’ mothers’ mothers’ fathers’ mothers mothers’ father, made a similar fresh start during the early 18th century. As the documents I recently uncovered in the archives match my current life very well, this seems…