OpenArch

Open Archives is a free website for finding genealogical records in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, developed by Bob Coret. It consists primarily of civil registration, church records and population registers, though many other record types are also included. It's main rival is WieWasWie.

Contents
Open Archives is a portal and aggregator of open historical data. By re-using open data from archives, researchers and historical societies Open Archives makes an portal which makes historical data from indexed sources available to end users in a user-friendly and innovative way. The innovation is especially evident with the automatic linking to other records, people in other data sources and additional context information.

Open data stimulates innovation! With this in mind, all data within Open Archives is also provided in an unambiguous manner as open data via an API and OAI-PMH data provider so that other developers can get to work. This makes Open Archives an aggregator of open historical data.


 * Information from 140 archives and societies about 277 million (non-unique) persons, from records like civil and church registries, currently mostly from the Netherlands and increasingly from Belgium and France
 * Many records linked to scans at archives, or other websites like FamilySearch
 * Records linked to other records about persons involved
 * Records linked to online biographies, online gravestone websites and online familytrees
 * Added context information from historical weather stations, census and historical maps
 * Available in Dutch, English, German and French

Links with FamilySearch
Open Archives has a partnership with FamilySearch that means some of their records have been made available on FamilySearch under the following historical record collections:


 * Netherlands, Archival Indexes, Miscellaneous Records
 * Netherlands, Archival Indexes, Public Records

It is important to note that only a small fraction of Open Archives' records are included in these collections and that they may not be updated often. For best results search directly on Open Archives' website.

Costs
All content can be searched (including wildcard and phonetic search and searching for two names) and viewed for free. Additional services, like monitoring and export in GEDCOM and PDF are available in a premium subscription.

Guidance

 * OpenArch.nl Website: Four Lessons