Sep 30, 2026
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Holland Michigan Meets the Netherlands
Uncover which Dutch province your ancestors called home and plan your heritage journey back.
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Love Netherlands
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Dear Netherlands,
There are two kinds of mornings in the Dutch spring. The kind where you cycle to the market and come home with warm cheese and rye bread and a handful of wild tulips. And the kind where it rains sideways for an hour, then the sun comes out and everything looks like a Vermeer. Today, if you’re lucky, is one of those mornings.
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Photo via Love Netherlands
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In today’s email:
- Discover Your Holland, Michigan Roots: Tracing Dutch-American Heritage Back to the Netherlands
- At The Café — Café Locus Publicus — Rotterdam’s Belgian Beer Headquarters
- Around The Web — The Love Netherlands Guide № 006: Gezelligheid, Discover Your Groningen Roots: Heritage, Diaspora, and Family History, The Love Netherlands Guide № 005: Dutch Cycling Culture + more
- From Love Netherlands — The Dutch-American Homecoming: From New York to Old Holland
- Dutch Food You Will Love — Speculaas — The Spiced Biscuit That Smells Like Christmas
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Discover Your Holland, Michigan Roots: Tracing Dutch-American Heritage Back to the Netherlands
👉 Read the full story
Michigan is home to one of the largest Dutch-American communities in the world. If you have Holland, Michigan Dutch heritage in your family, you are part of one of the most remarkable emigrant stories in American history. Your ancestors left the Netherlands in the 1840s for religious freedom. They crossed the Atlantic with little money. They built towns and named them after the places they left. Today, those names — Holland, Zeeland, Drenthe, Vriesland — still cover the map of western Michigan. This guide will help you trace your family from Michigan back to the Netherlands and plan your homecoming trip. Why Did Your Ancestors Leave the Netherlands? In the early 1840s, the Dutch Reformed Church was in crisis. The Dutch government had merged it with other Protestant denominations. A group of devout Calvinist Christians refused this. They called themselves the Afscheiding , or Seceders.…
👉 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
You land at Schiphol and something strange happens. The flat landscape outside the window looks familiar. The windmill on the horizon matches the painting your grandparents kept in their hallway. You know this place. Your family left it 150 years ago, but you know it. Around 4.5 million Americans claim Dutch ancestry. Most know their family came from the Netherlands. Far fewer have ever stood in the town their great-great-grandparents left…
👉 Read the full story
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Photo via Love Netherlands
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Dutch Food You Will Love
Speculaas — The Spiced Biscuit That Smells Like Christmas
Speculaas is a thin, crisp biscuit pressed with a wooden mould into intricate patterns — windmills, ships, faces from old folktales — and spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, white pepper and cardamom. It’s eaten year-round but reaches its peak in early December when bakeries make whole speculaaspoppen the size of your forearm. The big windmill-shaped biscuits show up free on saucers at every café from October onwards. A good speculaas should snap cleanly between your fingers and release the warm spice smell before you’ve even raised it to your mouth.
👉 Read the full story
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Also From Our Family
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