2009-08-25 A Guide to Genlias
need to-know facts, tips & tricks
civil registers
Genlias is a major Dutch genealogy site. The project to enter basic data from Dutch civil registers into a single index was started back in 1998. The data-entry is done by volunteers. Millions of records have been indexed already, but millions more remain to be done.
free
In the early days, the Genlias site was something you discovered by hearing about it.
It did not have its own domain name yet, and you needed to register and log in
to use
it.
Today, you can just browse to the Genlias site and start using it, no login or
registration required. Using the site is free.
records
The site does not offer the records themselves, just indexes for these records. Copies of the original records can be ordered from the archive that holds the collection. Few Dutch researchers use this capability, because the archives may charge as much as € 10 for a single photocopy ordered this way. It is much cheaper to gather a list of desired records and then visit the archive in person.
site issues
need-to-know
It is easy to be enthusiastic about the Genlias project and the many hours put in by many volunteers, but it is hard to be enthusiastic about the Genlias web site. It is disappointing that their hard work is presented on a site that is so poor technically that you actually need to know about some of its major shortcomings to make the most of its index database.
menu
The Genlias site was created with neither web standards nor safe browsing in mind. It demands that you enable scripting in your browser; if you browse safely, the site menu does not work at all.
accented letters
The query and result pages are still encoded using ISO 8859-1, Latin Alphabet
No 1. That includes a fair smattering of accented letters, but somehow, many of
these have been messed up anyway.
Not using Unicode and messing up supported characters may seem rather
embarrassing for a national archive already, but the truly embarrassing thing is
that, in all this time, neither of these two basic issues has been fixed
yet.
If you are searching for a name that includes
accented letters, your may want to repeat the search without accents, and, taking advantage of the site's begins with
option, with a partial name.
down
These are not the only Genlias site issues you need to know about. Even after more than ten
years, the site is frequently down. In the past, you simply would not get any
page at all. Nowadays site failure often presents itself in a less obvious way;
the site may superficially seem to be up and running just
fine, but every query returns zero results.
If your query does not produce results when you think it should, try some simple query
that should produce many results, such as searching for the name de Vries
or Jansen
; if that
does not return any results either, the site is down again, and you should leave
to come back and try again later.
slow
You are likely to need some patience. Sometimes the site responds fast, but it
often takes quite some time responding to queries. This complaint is well known, and the site does not try to hide this issue from you.
Au contraire, the
search page clearly states Press only once please. It may take several minutes before the search results appear.
to inform you about it.
If you do catch the site during one of its rare fast-response periods, do take advantage of it to get as
much done as possible.
easy to use
The site uses fixed-width columns. When a name does not fit a column width, it wraps around. The site does not adjust to your browser window; you can widen your browser window to allow wider columns, but the fixed-width layout does not take advantage of that.
The good thing about the fairly simple site is that it is easy to use. There
are two interfaces, a Dutch and an English one. The site defaults to Dutch, and
you can switch to English by clicking the English
link in the upper right
corner.
misinformation
There is a bit of misinformation on the welcome screen. It claims that Your search is in the most accurate source for Dutch genealogy, the Civil Register
,
and it is important to understand that that not true. The site does not let
you search the Civil Register, nor any official Civil Register database.
I find
it very disappointing that this site makes that claim, when it is in fact
important to understand how the site is different from that genealogical ideal.
That claim has probably mislead many visitors into assuming that the Genlias
data is complete and accurate, while in fact it is neither.
incomplete
Genlias lets you search a database of transcriptions, nothing more than that.
Genlias is not complete, it only contains data for the records that have been
transcribed. Transcription of the paper records is far from finished yet.
If you use Genlias for a while, you will probably notice that it contains much more marriage records than birth or death records. That prioritisation makes perfect sense; in principle, the data from marriage records is enough to construct a tree.
largest cities
Even more than ten years after the start of the project, data for the three largest Dutch cities, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and ’s-Gravenhage (The Hague) is still not in Genlias at all.
There are a few stray records for the municipality of The Hague, but when you search for records in Rotterdam,
Genlias
actually complains that An error has occurred
.
If you try the same search on the Dutch interface, Genlias
provides a more informative message: Fout: Plaats ROTTERDAM is niet bekend in
Genlias
.
The literal English translation is Error:
place ROTTERDAM is not known in Genlias
. Genlias does not only not have any
index records for Rotterdam, it does not even recognise
Rotterdam as a valid Dutch place name.
Digital Stamboom
A lot of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and ’s-Gravenhage data is online. A growing
collection of digital data is on their individual web sites.
A lot of the data that is not in Genlias can be found in the Digitale Stamboom (Digital Family Tree).
The central site collects data from various Dutch archives that use the Digitale Stamboom
software, including Rotterdam, The Hague, Leiden, Delft and Eindhoven, and the
regional archives for North Holland and Eemland.
Amsterdam
Data for Amsterdam is available on the site of the Stadsarchief Amsterdam (Amsterdam City Archive).
transcription errors
The Genlias index records have been created by volunteers with
varying levels of experience and expertise.
As far as I know, most data has been entered just once, and has not been
checked by a second party, nor verified by independent double entry as some
other transcriptions projects do.
Some years ago the site added the ability to report errors. I am a pretty heavy Genlias user, so my numbers are probably not typical, but I have reported dozens of errors. Some of these transcription errors are apparent from the index data itself, others I discovered because I had consulted other sources, such as images of the original documents.
Civil Register
Genlias contains data from the Civil Registers. The Civil Registration was started around 1811. Data from before that time is in parish records. The Genlias project incidentally includes parish registers, but still focuses on the Civil Register.
marriages
Today, most Dutch marriages from 1811 through about 1925 are in Genlias. Marriages are public after 75 years, but that does not imply that they are entered into the database as soon as the 75 years are over. You should expect a delay of a few years extra.
What birth and death registers are included still varies widely from one region to the next.
numbers
As of mid 2009, there are about 12,5 million index records in the Genlias database. A typical index record for a marriage mentions six persons (bride, groom and their parents), a typical index record for a birth mentions 3 persons (child and its parents), a typical index record for a death mentions 4 persons (deceased, parents and one spouse). In total, the 12,5 million index records contain more than 50 million mentions.
The site averages about 1,5 million queries per month, that equals about 50.000 queries per day, about 2.000 queries per hour, about 30 queries per minute, and that is one query every two seconds.
world empire
colonies
The Netherlands once was a world empire with many colonies. It is the aim of the Genlias project to include data from all former colonies. Genlias includes data for Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles and Curaçao.
Nieuw-Amsterdam / New York
A very recent addition is data for New Netherland. Genlias now contains records for Nieuw-Amsterdam / New York baptisms and marriages; baptism 1639 - 1800 and marriages 1639 - 1801.
When searching for names, do search for Dutch or Latin spellings of first names,. Also keep in mind that, although sometimes used interchangeably, and sorted between x and z, that the Dutch ligature ij (U+0133) is not the same as the letter y. As the ligature ij is not part of either ASCII or ISO 8859-1, it is generally written as an letter i followed by a letter j.
example search
In Genlias, a search for Petrus Stuyvesant
produces no
results, but a search for Petrus Stuijvesant
does. The name Stuijvesant
is sometimes spelled Stuijvesants
(an extra s at the end), so it generally best
to search for Stuijvesant
(without the s) using the begins with
option; that will return both
index records containing Stuijvesant
and
index records containing Stuijvesants
.
This web capture shows the index record for the baptism of Nicolaes Willem Stuijvesant, son of Petrus Stuijvesant and Judith Baijard.
updates
2011-04-23: Gemeentearchief Amsterdam
The web address of the Amsterdam City Archive (Gemeentearchief Amsterdam) has changed. The link has been updated.
2011-07-21: Amsterdam marriages in Genlias
There used to be very little information on Amsterdam in Genlias. Amsterdam marriages 1869-1932 have just been added to Genlias.
links
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.