Groningen Church Records

The website Allegroningers.nl offers many church records that help with Dutch research prior to 1811 in Groningen Province. For example, the Dutch Reformed Church's records for Hoogezand have a baptism and marriage book that begins in 1668. This record has been indexed and is searchable. For the city of Groningen marriage records are available beginning in 1595 and baptisms starting in 1640. The records for this time are very clear, they are written in Dutch, however, the handwriting is in the old gothic style. The early records are in column format and provide a 1-3 line entry for each event. The baptism records contain the birth date and typically where the parents were from. Marriage records are similar with including where the bride and groom are from. This website includes Dutch Reformed Church records as well as Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Walloon, Baptist, and Jewish records. These records are in Dutch except for the Roman Catholic records are in latin and the Jewish records are in Hebrew. All of these have records before 1811.

Unfortunately when searching for an individual in the website there is no way to distinguish what church you would like to search for, but you can limit the search to a specific place. Alle Groningers has a goal to film all baptism, marriage and burial records up till 1811 and all public acts of civil status records. Volunteers index the records to make them easier to search, however, they are not complete so searching through these records may require a page-by-page search through a record. Fortunately their images are very clear and they are in color. At the bottom right it allows you to choose which images you want to view which are divided into ten page increments.

There are some differences of what the Family History Catalog has and what is on AlleGroningers. FamilySearch has membership records and parish dealings, for example. FamilySearch has not made these available online however. There are other sources in order to get these online and can be found through Cyndi’s List. Mot of the records on AlleGroningers are available to browse through online. Though they want to do more than the church records that is apart of their overall goal.