Ancestory

The open name index

Three times now we have run into the same wall from different sides. The anglophone world keeps the records public but sells the index (Ancestry owns the names). Estonia gives the data away but the names are locked inside un-transcribed handwriting. Poland offers free viewing but no dataset at all. The Netherlands is the proof that it can be done the other way. Open Archieven aggregates the genealogical indexes of some 200 archives into one openly-licensed (CC0) dataset — around 370 million person-mentions, free to search and to download established [openArchieven] . It is, simply, the thing everyone else charges for: an open name index. We asked it — through its own statistics, harvesting nothing — what is inside.

What the records are

Every mention sits in a record of a life event. By type:

The backbone of European genealogy: civil registration of deaths, births and marriages after ~1811, and the church baptism books before it — 119,248,216 death records alone. Indexed, named, and open.

The names themselves

This is the payoff — the part that is proprietary almost everywhere else. The commonest surnames in the index, by number of person-mentions:

Jansen (“John’s son”) leads, then De Jong (“the young”), De Vries (“the Frisian”), Bakker (“baker”), Van Dijk (“of the dike”) — Dutch surnames wear their meanings plainly. Each is a doorway to over a million records of real people.

The lives in the index

Where an occupation is recorded, it is mostly the work of an agrarian, artisan world:

Farmers and labourers above all, then the trades — carpenters, merchants, servants, weavers, tailors — and the notaries whose deeds preserved so many of the rest.

Why this one matters

Set the walls side by side. In Britain and America the parish register is free but its index belongs to a company. In Estonia the archive is CC0 but the names must still be read out of three centuries of cursive by hand. Here, the index itself — the transcribed names, dates, places and roles — is public-domain and downloadable in bulk established [openArchieven] . It is the answer to a question that runs under this whole project: can open genealogy include the names? The Netherlands says yes.

Read it honestly, though. These are person-mentions, not unique people — one ancestor recurs across their birth, marriages and death, and as a parent on their children’s records. It is an index — a finding aid that points to the source, not the source itself. Coverage is Dutch- and Belgian-led. And the CC0 licence covers the data, not the linked images. But within those limits it is the real thing: open names, at the scale of a nation.

Stage 8 of 8 · The transatlantic arc

Sources