Modern Software Experience

2013-01-02

Dutch civil records index

Genlias

Genlias.nl was a Dutch site that provided an index to the official Dutch civil records. Genlias offered both a Dutch and English user interface.

Genlias Home Page, English

Genlias Search

content

Genlias did not merely provide indexes for vital records, but for marriage records as well; Genlias provided index records for dutch birth, marriage and death (BMD) records. Over time, it came to include data for former Dutch colonies as well. For a long time, Genlias lacked data for the largest Dutch cities, Rotterdam and Amsterdam, and the Genlias index was never complete.

Dutch birth, marriage and death (BMD) records wered started around 1811, by Napoleonic decree. Genlias did not provide an index to the older Dutch baptisms, marriage notices, and burial records. An notable exception to this rule was the inclusion of New Netherlands baptisms 1639-1800.

Unlike the American Social Security Death Index (SSDI), Genlias never provided data for the recently deceased. Public availability of BMD records is limited by Dutch law to 100 years after birth, 75 years after marriage and 50 years after death.

Genlias Results

name

The name genlias is short for genealogical lias. A lias is something that keeps a bundle of documents together. Genlias presented the data of regional archives together in one national site.

Genlias Record

brief history

Genlias became operational in 1998. The Genlias service was originally provided through a subdomain of the Rijksarchiefdienst (RAD), www-lias.rad.archief.nl, and required users to register and log in. The genlias.nl domain wasn't registered until 2002 Mar 29, and during most of 2002 and 2003, it was possible to use both domains.
A frequently unmentioned functionality of Genlias is the ability to order scans from the regional archives.

Genlias Order

When Genlias started, you had to log in and register, and it did not contain much data yet. As Genlias grew in size and became better known, the number of visitors increased. The Genlias site itself provided a statistics page, that contained monthly data since 2004, and was kept up to date till 2012.

Genlias Statistics

In January of 2004, there were 4.324.391 records, containing 19.604.092 person entries.
In December of 2011, there were 15.895.564 records, containing 64.253.555 person entries.

In January of 2004, there were 859.799 queries by 130.929 visitors.
In December of 2011, there were 2.241.844 queries by 127.541 visitors.
The number of visitors grew to about 400.000 in March of 2008, and then declined again. The reason for the decline is the increasing availability of other services, including the availability of the same data on the websites of the regional archives themselves; genealogical research tends to be localised, so many researchers use regional archives. Many researchers are also taking advantage of www.digitalestamboom.nl, a site that combines the indexes of archives using the Digitale Stamboom (digital family tree) software.

reliability

During its early years, the Genlias site was notoriously unreliable. The first and last major site redesign was done in 2003. Since then, the site has been fairly stable.

volunteers

Genlias was a volunteer indexing project long before the Vele Handen (Many Hands) site for crowd-sourcing projects was created. The actual records are with the regional archives, and volunteers worked for the regional archives to create indexes for these records. Many Genlias volunteers stayed with the Genlias project for many years. The Regional Historisch Centrum Limburg (Regional Historic Centre Limburg) has more than once honoured volunteers that had been entering data for more than 12,5 years.

The record indexing is an ongoing project, but because of relatively recent changes, volunteers have been losing their enthusiasm to contribute.

Early in 2012, the National Archive transferred its genealogical activities to the Central Bureau of Genealogy (CBG). That is a real change, with real consequences, but one that should have been of little consequence to the volunteers that were South Holland records for inclusion in Genlias, as the Central Bureau of Genealogy and the Regional Archive of South Holland share the building with the National Archive. Somehow, it was decided to stop the indexing anyway.

Genlias cost money to run, but has always been provided for free, and that helped to get volunteers for indexing. Genlias's replacement, WieWasWie was never going to entirely free, but late in 2012, while WieWasWie was still in Beta, the Central Bureau of Genealogy decided to severely limit the search functionality of WieWieWas for visitors.

WieWasWie

WieWasWie is a technically more ambitious project, that not only lets you search the index and view scans, but also let's you create & share your family tree on the same site. WieWasWie aims to replace both Genlias.nl and www.digitalestamboom.nl, but the latter is still online.

Plans to replace Genlias date back to 2008. The current WieWasWie site was started as the project idea MijnVoorouders (MyAncestors) by the Stichting ArchiefProgrammatuur (Foundation for Archive Software). The WieWasWie Public Beta in 2012 received such a disastrous response, that the ability to order a subscription was turned off, all payments were refunded, and trial subscriptions provided full access till the end of the year.
WieWasWie is so poor that it received the GeneAward for Worst New Genealogy Product of 2012.

Genlias News

termination notice

On 2012 Jul 26, the following notice was posted at the bottom of Genlias's news page:

Op 2 juli jl. is de website WieWasWie in beta live gegaan. Genlias blijft daarnaast tot 1 november 2012 gewoon beschikbaar.

and this translation was provided on the English news page:

On July 2 this year, a beta version of the website WieWasWie went live. Genlias will be available as until November 1, 2012.

petition

As word of this announcement spread, Dutch genealogist became worried. At that time, WieWasWie wasn't a sufficient replacement for Genlias, because it still did not offer the same search functionality. The most obvious issue was that WieWasWie still did not offer the ability to search on two names. That is a basic feature essential to locating marriage records, and quickly reconstructing families from the index.

Genlias Petition

Dutch genealogists started an online petition, Houd Genlias in de lucht, minimaal tot er een goede vervanging is! (Keep Genlias running, at least until there is a good replacement), that was soon signed by thousands of concerned Dutch genealogists.

reprieve

On 2012 Oct 9, the Automatiseringsgids (Automation Guide) published an interview with Cess Heysteck, chairman of HCC Genealogie, one of the larger Dutch genealogie organisation, about the need to keep Genlias online. That same day, the WieWieWas blog announced that Genlias would keep running until 2013 Jan 1.

WieWieWas subscriptions 2013

paying for search

On 2012 Dec 6, the CBG Nieuws not only reported that WieWasWie now included the ability to search on two names, but also that not all search functionality would no longer be free; readers who followed the link to the updated WieWasWie subscription page noticed that searching for two names was now categorised as an advanced functionality only available to paying subscribers. Even simple sorting and filtering abilities had been taken away from visitors. Thus, unless you pay for a WieWasWie subscription, WieWasWie is significantly less functional than Genlias.

Genlias gone

Yesterday, 2013 Jan 1, Genlias has been replaced by WieWasWie.

Genlias gone

When you surf to genlias.nl now, you'll get to see the above page, telling you that Genlias is offline and that WieWasWie is the new national genealogical platform. That recent introduction of that term has raised a few eyebrows, not in the least because it was never applied to Genlias, but the message is clear: Genlias is dead now, long live WieWasWie.
After a few seconds, the page auto-refreshes and redirects to wiewaswie.nl.

Genlias gone

The WieWasWie site is still displaying a Beta logo, but that's nonsense; Genlias has been taken offline, and you're redirected to WieWasWie.
WieWasWie is no longer in Beta. WieWasWie is in production, despite the fact that it is still providing an user experience that would be disappointing for an Early Beta.

WieWasWie search 404 error

WieWasWie is not very reliable yet. Most users that tried to search yesterday, got to see a 404 page. It was so bad, that the WieWasWie team even blogged about. The blog post admits that the problem existed for several days already, and stresses that it isn't a capacity issue.

WieWasWiePerformanceTweets

Today, both @WieWasWie and @MindBus, the company developing WieWasWie, both tweeted that they are working on the performance to deal with the flood of visitors…

Goodbye Genlias

Genlias was not perfect. During its early years, Genlias frequently went down. Genlias never looked as flashy as WieWasWie does, but it was functional. In recent years Genlias proved to be quite stable despite an ever increasing load, and had become a site that Dutch genealogists could rely upon.
WieWasWie has Dutch genealogists longing back for Genlias, but Genlias is gone.

links

 

Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.