Introduction
In my contact with American genealogists I discovered that the genealogical basics are not completely the same all over the world. So if you are starting with your research in the Netherlands, there are a few traps you need to be warned about!

Married women
The first difference is very simple: in the United States, married women no longer use their maiden name. Here in the Netherlands, the maiden name of a married woman is always used in official documents, for example in death certificates. But also as the birth of a child is registered, the maiden name of the mother is always listed. For genealogical research this is very handy, as you can well imagine.

Dates
Maybe you have already noticed: in the Netherlands, dates use the format dd-mm-yy. So 7-11-1822 means November the seventh 1822.

Alphabetical ordering
There are a lot of Dutch surnames with prefixes, for example Van Ophem. You will find this surname in an index under the O! And Peter den Ouden is also listed under the O.

Kwartierstaat
What? I am sorry, a little bit of Dutch slipped in. The English equivalent is pedigree or Ahnentafel. The kwartierstaat is a very frequent method of organizing genealogical dates in the Netherlands. This kind of genealogical table usually begins with the genealogist. He or she is number one. The parents receive the numbers 2 (father) and 3 (mother). The grandparents have the numbers 4 (paternal grandfather), 5 (paternal grandmother), 6 (maternal grandfather) and 7 (maternal grandmother). Are you still following me?

This system includes all of the ancestors in maternal and paternal lines. Females always have an odd number, males an even number. To find the parents, you only have to double the number of a person. For example: the parents of my great great grandfather #24 Jan van Ophem are #48 Jan van Ophem and #49 Trijntje Appelman. If you are good with arithmetic you will notice that the fifth generation of ancestors is starting with the fifth power of 2, and so on.

Strange symbols
The last topic is not so complex. It is only a small list of genealogical symbols:

* indicates a birth 
~ indicates a baptism 
x indicates a marriage 
† indicates a death

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