How does it feel to walk around in the house where your great-grandfather lived before he emigrated to the United States? Rich Appeldoorn knows exactly how it feels: “Getting us access to the home/café was wonderful. It gave me a new perspective on how my ancestors lived in Holland.”Rich asked me for help with his […]
Let me start with a few lines of an email message that I received in August 2017. “I will be in Amsterdam from 24-28 September (2017) and had hoped to contact a local genealogist, well before now, to access further family records prior to my arrival. Given the time lines at this point I imagine […]
It was a sunny Saturday morning in June. I arrived at 9.45am in Bergen op Zoom, a former military town in the western part of the province of Noord-Brabant, the Netherlands. This was the moment that I would meet an American couple: Jim and Kathy VanVliet of Tacoma, Washington. Four months earlier they asked me […]