LINKS
LINKS is a linking system for historical family reconstruction. The core data of the LINKS system consists of indexed civil certificates. These certificates are available from 1812 — the start of the Dutch Vital Registration — until the year they are confidential based on privacy laws.
For more than 20 years, scores of volunteers at the Dutch city and regional archives have been working to index civil records. In 2022, the index contained over 125 million person names and is continuously growing not only because new civil certificates become public each year but also because existing gaps are filled.
All digitized data are publicly accessible through WieWasWie.
The aim is to reconstruct the life courses and family relations of everyone who was born, married, and/or died in the Netherlands after 1811. LINKS has been releasing matched indices of the marriage records in 2006. These releases were initially known as the GENLIAS datasets, before the name LINKS was adopted in 2010. LINKS started in 2010 with a subsidy from the NWO program Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage (CATCH). This has resulted in a country-wide matching of all marriage certificates as well as province-wide reconstructions of life courses and family relations for Drenthe, Groningen, Limburg, and Zeeland.
https://hdl.handle.net/10622/MR4GPS
https://hdl.handle.net/10622/EOZIMW
https://hdl.handle.net/10622/AIVFAK
https://hdl.handle.net/10622/QUJNC
