Sources – Introduction

There are many sources used for the genealogical research around the name of Dorsten, Van Dorssen, Van Dorsen and Van Dorst. There are a number of ways to categorise. In addition, they can be accessed on different and multiple ways. There where you had to access the sources physically in the past (archives, personal knowledge, BDM registers, books, newspapers) and had to read original texts (in the ancient language), is that nowadays often accessible via the internet or otherwise electronically and more and more by means of index files and transcriptions (digital source processing).

As a result of this, many events have been found for a name that cannot directly be linked to a family tree. But these are interesting to determine the general history of the name. In the timeline at the top of the home page of the site, you can see the History Context (from the outside) that could be interesting to determine which archives are interesting, and a bar with Events (from the genealogy) showing the main conclusions of the analysis on the found references.

There are many national, regional/state, and local archives, which may contain various types of archives with different credentials:

• BDM-data (at family trees, out of scope here) – witnesses at others are here interesting though
• Notaries – particularly wills, custody arrangement, real estate
• Charters and jurisdiction (acts) – very various references
• Family archives of noble/rich families – quite diverse, for example the employment relationship
• Military and war archives – registration, die, attendance, grades
• University inscription – wealthy families, direction known, age
• Taxes – reference to live, travel, access
• Accounts-payments and the reason
• Census data – often with housing information and composition of the family
• Shipping archives (such as VOC) – embarking, participation in travel, death
• Trade administrations – buy and sell, trade actions
• Farm/buildings registrations – property rights
• Genealogical investigations (of others) – reuse, basically check at the source
• (Old) Genealogical magazines – reuse, basically check at the source
• Letters and other post – can contain many types of credentials
• Illness registration (for example, the plague) – death, already quite used to accurately
• Feudal administration – ownership and user administration
• Citizen – moving to another city, job
• Managers, orphanages, guesthouses – presence, composition of household
• Christian archives (Monastery, Bishop, Church, etc.) – used to be very important and much
• Old articles (for example, from a newspaper), digitized old books
• Old public administrations, such as the Holy Roman Empire, Sheriffs, etc.
• Old libraries (like the Hanseatic city of Zutphen in the Walberg Church)
• And much more.

The entries from the archives (references) are now recorded in an Excel sheet (possibly in a database in the future) where it is registered where (region, city) the reference is, who is mentioned and when it was. The regions (provinces, etc.) used to be much more important, because the control was much more local and the archives are often also at the regional level. The most important regions for these family trees are the Dutch provinces of Overijssel, Gelderland, Utrecht, South Holland and the German states of Lower Saxony and NRW.