Sep 23, 2026
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Trace Your Dutch Ancestry Home
Discover how to navigate archives and records to find your ancestral town in the Netherlands.
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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:
- How to Plan a Dutch Heritage Trip to Your Ancestral Town
- At The Café — Café De Jaren — Amsterdam’s Light-Filled Reading Café
- Around The Web — Discover Your Dutch Roots in New Zealand: A Heritage Guide for Dutch-New Zealanders, Volendam Day Trip from Amsterdam: Your Complete 2026 Guide, How Much Does It Cost to Retire in the Netherlands? (2026 Budget Guide for Americans) + more
- From Love Netherlands — The Love Netherlands Guide № 005: Dutch Cycling Culture
- Dutch Food You Will Love — Stroopwafel — The Dutch Biscuit That Became a Ritual
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How to Plan a Dutch Heritage Trip to Your Ancestral Town
👉 Read the full story
Your great-grandmother left a small Dutch town in the 1890s. She packed a single trunk and sailed to a new world. She never went back. You have her photograph. You have her name. You have the name of the town she left behind. Now you want to go. A Dutch heritage trip connects you with something larger than travel. You are not just visiting a country. You are returning to a place that shaped who you are. This guide walks you through every step — from your first family records to standing in the village your ancestors called home. Start With What You Already Have Before you buy a flight, gather every document your family kept. Old passports, birth certificates, and marriage records all contain clues. Look for names, dates, and place names. Even a handwritten letter can point you to a province or a town. Ask older relatives what they remember. Write it all down. Record them if they allow…
👉 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 De Jaren — Amsterdam’s Light-Filled Reading Café
Café De Jaren on the Nieuwe Doelenstraat is a wide, two-storey grand café with a sun-drenched terrace built right out over the Amstel. It opened in 1990 in a former bank, and the high ceilings, white walls and stacks of newspapers in twelve languages give it the feel of a public reading room with espresso. Locals come for breakfast with the FT, for long afternoon meetings, and for the canal-side terrace where on summer afternoons every chair faces the water. The kitchen does proper meals all day, the cake counter is generous, and nobody minds if you stay three hours.
👉 Visit the café
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Around The Web
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From Love Netherlands
The Netherlands has more bicycles than people — roughly 23 million bikes for about 18 million residents — and the average Dutch person cycles close to 1,000 kilometres a year. Cycling here is not sport or hobby so much as plumbing: the ordinary way a banker, a schoolchild, and a grandmother all move through the day, in normal clothes, without helmets, often with a phone in one hand and a passenger on the back. This is Guide № 005 in The Love…
👉 Read the full story
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Photo by Liam McGarry on Unsplash
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Dutch Food You Will Love
Stroopwafel — The Dutch Biscuit That Became a Ritual
A stroopwafel is two thin waffle layers, bound together with warm caramel syrup, served on top of your coffee cup so the rising steam softens the middle. It was born in 19th-century Gouda, where a local baker used up the day’s leftover dough and the last of the syrup barrel. The result is the small daily joy of every Dutch café — placed on your saucer without asking, warm against your fingers, gone in three bites. A real stroopwafel should be slightly chewy in the middle, not hard like the ones in supermarket bags. The best ones are still sold fresh at market stalls in Gouda on Wednesdays.
👉 Read the full story
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Also From Our Family
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