Admin – History
The first action with regard to the search of the family tree was around 1985. Based on information from the family and the municipal archives of Steenwijk, the own family tree was quickly researched in outline until just before 1750, where the ancestor was married in Steenwijk and had children there. It also turned out that the name was not common in the Netherlands, based on the telephone book there were around 100 all over the Netherlands. The knowledge was kept handwritten in a notebook and made with a diagram on a large paper.
Around 2000 interest arose again and a report about Van Dorsten was ordered from a genealogical agency. This was an incoherent list of occurrences in the last three hundred years and also an address list of people named at the end of the last century in the Netherlands. From now on everything was copied into Excel sheets and Word documents and stored in a structured way. It mainly concerned information from the own family tree. However, the report and further investigation did not yield much and the investigation was delayed for another ten years or so.
Since 2012 it has been picked up again and has remained very active ever since. In addition, the own pedigree is completed via a Top-Down approach back to the ancestor who married in 1683 in Dalfsen. In addition, very intensive searches have been conducted on the Internet since then. It appeared that an old (1490) tribe originated from Neuenhaus (county of Bentheim) and that the necessary publications have already been published. “Die Chronik der Familie van Dorsten” by “Dr. Siegfried Wiarda und Paul Jung “has now been acquired (2012). Based on this, an initial setup could be made and supplemented.
In addition, an article about the family name Van Dorsten appeared to have been published in an edition of the genealogical magazine De Navorscher (mid-19th to mid-20th century). All volumes of this have now also been obtained on DVD. This showed that there was also an important tribe from Dordrecht and that there were tribes from Leiden and Zwartsluis. The article in De Navorscher was by Arie van der Marel who was married within the Neuenhaus tribe. He was a genealogist and his notes are kept in the National Archives in The Hague.
In the period 2016 – 2017, the search was strongly intensified and the Internet was systematically and structured Bottom-Up searched based on the Digital Resource Files (www.geneaknowhow.net, including Belgium, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia). All digitally available BMD data (Baptism, Marriage, Death) were searched for the name Dorsten and variants, especially up to 1811 (introduction of the Civil Registry) and many thousands of entries were found and recorded. The national archives (such as Archives.nl and WieWasWie.nl), all provincial archives and specific archives of major cities and regions were also searched digitally. In this way, contact was made with various other Van Dorstens.
To fill in missing knowledge, there have been (temporary) memberships of, among others, MyHeritage, Ancestry, Geneanet and HoGenDa. Before the introduction of the Civil Registry, names were recorded phonetically and also regularly only patronyms. Therefore, the search was extended to the (possibly) related names Van Dorssen, Van Dorsser and Van Dorst (the latter limited to 1700). This has been supplemented by contacts in the various family trees, contacts with all Van Dorstens on Facebook, inquiries with local archaeological associations and all available data after the introduction of the Civil Registry. Where possible, all information is checked in original sources and periodically updated what is still available digitally from old archives.
In April 2017, a start was made to set up the website for all genealogical information regarding the name Van Dorsten and related names. This is set up in WordPress and 3 languages (Dutch, English, German). After that, an extensive time analysis was also performed based on all the names found for 1800. The site is regularly updated and is fed from a Word document that is immediately a backup and classified as a book.
In 2019 (completed in 2020) it was started to find all living Van Dorstens worldwide via the internet (Facebook and LinkedIn), telephone directories and other administrations, to make contact and to find out in which family tree they belong. As a result, it is now known which family trees with the name still exist. Subsequently, in mid-2020, a start was made with the complete rebuilding of the website (via WordPress with Astra theme) in combination with a program (TNG) to make family trees based on a genealogical database available via standard Gedcom files. All family trees are recorded in the database program Aldfear with which the Gedcom files can be created.