Jul 15, 2026
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Uncover Your Dutch Heritage
Explore South Holland’s archives and medieval records to reconnect with your family’s fascinating past.
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Love Netherlands
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Dear Netherlands,
Every Dutch village has a bell tower, a market square, a brown café, and a bakery older than the country it sits in. The magic of the Netherlands isn’t Amsterdam. It’s the 400 other places that don’t need to try. Places like Thorn, where every house is painted white. Places like Giethoorn, where nobody has ever driven to the shop.
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Photo via Love Netherlands
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In today’s email:
- Tracing Your Family in South Holland: A Heritage Travel Plan
- At The Café — Café Locus Publicus — Rotterdam’s Belgian Beer Headquarters
- Around The Web — Tracing Your Family in North Holland: A Heritage Travel Plan, Texel Island Netherlands: The Complete Visitor’s Guide, Tracing Your Family in Zeeland: A Heritage Travel Plan + more
- From Love Netherlands — Haarlem Day Trip from Amsterdam: The Complete 2026 Guide
- Dutch Food You Will Love — Raw Herring — The Dutch Test
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Tracing Your Family in South Holland: A Heritage Travel Plan
👉 Read the full story
Tracing your family in South Holland means standing where Dutch history happened. This is the province that shaped the Dutch nation — and sent more emigrants abroad than almost anywhere else in the country. Rotterdam’s harbour launched thousands of ships carrying families to South Africa, America, and Australia. Leiden sheltered the Pilgrim Fathers before they crossed the Atlantic. Dordrecht, the oldest city in the Netherlands, holds church records stretching back centuries. If you have Dutch roots, there is a very good chance they lead here. South Holland is not just the most populous province in the Netherlands. It is the emotional heart of the Dutch diaspora story. The surnames Van Leeuwen, De Jong, Van Dijk, Visser, and De Graaf that appear in Afrikaner family trees, Dutch-American communities, and Indonesian-Dutch households often trace back to the flat polders, canal towns, and…
👉 Read the full story
Have you been there? Do you have a memory of this corner of the Netherlands? Hit reply and tell us — we’d love to hear your story.
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At The Café
Café Locus Publicus — Rotterdam’s Belgian Beer Headquarters
Locus Publicus is a wood-panelled café on the Oostzeedijk in Rotterdam, with more than 200 beers on the menu and a chalkboard of rotating Belgian taps that changes every fortnight. Rotterdam is mostly modern after the 1940 bombing, but Locus is the city’s quiet exception — wooden floors, candles in glass jars, a cat that sleeps on the bar. Locals come for the Trappist selection and the kitchen’s straightforward menu of stoofpotten and good charcuterie boards. It’s the bar that proves Rotterdam has the same drinking culture as Amsterdam, just told quieter.
👉 Visit the café
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Around The Web
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From Love Netherlands
A Haarlem day trip from Amsterdam ranks among the best decisions any visitor to the Netherlands can make. Just fifteen minutes by train, Haarlem delivers the Dutch Golden Age atmosphere that Amsterdam once promised before the crowds arrived. Wide market squares, ancient churches, master paintings, and a thriving café culture wait here — with barely a queue in sight. This guide covers everything you need to know to make the most of a day in one…
👉 Read the full story
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Photo via Love Netherlands
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Dutch Food You Will Love
Raw Herring — The Dutch Test
Every spring, a Dutch ritual unfolds on the streets of Amsterdam, The Hague, and Scheveningen. Herring stalls put out the year’s first catch — the Hollandse nieuwe — and locals queue to eat it raw, tipped back by the tail, sometimes on a soft white roll with onions. It tastes of the sea and of brine and, if you’re lucky, of nothing at all in the best possible way. Foreigners tend to grimace the first time. The Dutch laugh gently. “Three bites,” they say. “Then you love it forever.” They are usually right.
👉 Read the full story
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