At the beginning of this year, the Meertens Institute launched a new database on migration in the Netherlands in the twentieth century. How did this database come about and what can you look up in it? Researcher Gerrit Bloothooft answers these questions. Bloothooft works as an onlooker at Utrecht University and collaborates with the Meertens Institute.
“Of course we already had the family name bank and the first name bank”, Bloothooft begins. "In that first database you can see, for example, how certain surnames are spread across the country. You can therefore already deduce global migration patterns from this.
However, we were asked from various sides whether we could expand that information. The data on which the first name bank is based could help us with this. These come from the Municipal Personal Records Database (GBA)."
Homestead
“The GBA contains data from all people in the Netherlands who lived in or after 1994, which is the year of digitization of the GBA. But also the details of a person's parents are mentioned, even if they were no longer alive in 1994. As a result, our database is more or less complete from 1930. But if those parents were still alive in 1994, we also know the grandparents, including their place of birth. We even have data on about forty percent of the people who were born around 1880. That means four generations. By comparing their birthplaces and their current places of residence, you will learn more about the migration of Dutch people. And then it turns out that the Dutch are fairly homeless.”
“For the description of the origin of people and their ancestors, we have taken the generation of 30-50 years as a starting point. At this stage of life, when many people have a job and children, there is generally little need to move. We then looked at each place where this group of people was born. We map that percentage. In addition, we can show on another map where the parents of this group of people were born. The same goes for grandparents and great-grandparents. In this way you will find out where the roots of the current population of a place lie. Then we turned it around and looked at the people who were born in a particular place between 1880 and 1900. You can map out where the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren now live for this group. That way you can see how the original population of a place has spread.”
Dialect Preservation
Why is this interesting for research into language and culture? Bloothooft:“Because you can expect that linguistic and cultural expressions are better preserved in places and areas where relatively little is moved. And we found examples of that too. Think of Urk, Staphorst, Katwijk. In these places you see few people leaving, and you see few new people going there either. But the population also moves relatively little in regions (the database uses the division into so-called COROP areas) such as South Limburg and Twente. And it is precisely here that a lot of dialect is still spoken.”
You can also look at the migration per province on the website, the researcher explains. “If you look at such a larger unit, you see that the Dutch are very region-specific. People rarely move out of their province. This applies least to the province of Utrecht. But of course you can also say:if you live in Utrecht, you can go in all directions.”
In addition to migration within the Netherlands, the database also provides information about migration from abroad. “In Amsterdam, for example, you see that 30 percent of the inhabitants between the ages of 30 and 50 were born abroad. Rotterdam and The Hague have comparable figures. In the latter city you also see that 4 percent of the previous generation comes from the Dutch East Indies. We do not know the (great) grandparents of this group of people. So for previous generations, the numbers are distorted in that regard.”
Small distances
The website is primarily aimed at people interested in local and regional history. “We therefore do not provide information per surname. The maps create a broader perspective:from the municipality, the region and the province. The website is also somewhat intended to make people think and to encourage research.” Bloothooft mainly conducts research into the distribution of surnames, but he is also interested in the distance between grandparents and grandchildren in relation to age. “That distance is generally stable until children are 20. People move between the ages of 20 and 30. Then those children will form a family again and then they will stay in one place. As long as children live with their parents, the average distance to grandparents in the Netherlands is 22 kilometers. If they start a family themselves, that distance increases slightly and increases to an average of about 35 kilometers. But half of the children live less than 6 km from the grandparents, which later increases to 14 km. That shows that we move over relatively short distances in the Netherlands.”