Admin – Webmaster

I will briefly introduce myself as designer and administrator of this website. My name is Gerrit Jan van Dorsten and I was born in 1966 near Steenwijk in the Kop van Overijssel. After my studies at the HTS in Groningen I started working for an ICT company and went to live in the center of the country. Via the Amersfoort region and the Arnhem region I ended up in Uden, where I have been living since 2004.

Around my twentieth birthday we inherited a state Bible from the family in which an ancestor wrote all his children around 1820. This aroused my interest in the family tree and I already invested some time in it, gathered information from family members, visited the city archive of Steenwijk (still really such a cellar with all kinds of books from the past) and also once the national archive in The Hague.

Then I started my working career and there was no more time for this time-consuming hobby. Between my 30th and 35th years there was a brief revival, ordered a genealogical report and started to administer all the material on the computer. But the material obtained was disappointing and much further research had to be done. And so it came to a standstill.

Sales of .eu domain names started in 2006. I have always had a great interest in European unification and also the need to present the family tree on its own site in the long term. I immediately recorded the name Van-Dorsten.eu. It took more than ten years before the genealogy was created, but I immediately had access to my own email addresses with the @ van-Dorsten.eu extension.

But when I passed 45, the interest picked up again and it hasn’t stopped since then. In the meantime, a lot of information had become available via the internet and I was therefore looking forward to it. I was also able to trace my own pedigree even further back and discovered that my son is the only remaining ancestor of my own pedigree (Steenwijk).