Transcribe Dutch Genealogy Records

Dutch family history splits at the start of the nineteenth century. Before it, the record is the church register: baptisms, marriages and burials, known together as the DTB registers (doop, trouw, begraven). Civil registration, the Burgerlijke Stand, was introduced under French rule and in most of the country began in 1811. Its acts are fuller and more regular. The church registers before it are older, terser, and written in hands that most modern Dutch speakers struggle to read.

KleioBase reads those records and translates them into English, then links every person, date and place into one connected family archive. Reading is the first step, not the product.

How KleioBase reads Dutch records

You upload a scan or a photo of the record. KleioBase reads the handwriting and gives you a transcription in the original Dutch alongside an English translation. It then extracts the people, dates, places and relationships the record contains.

Early Dutch registers pack a great deal into very little. A seventeenth-century Amsterdam baptism is often three names bracketed together - the father, the mother and a witness - beside the child's given name and a date. There may be no surname anywhere, only a patronymic such as Jansz (son of Jan) or Pietersdr (daughter of Pieter). KleioBase records each person with their role, so a witness can later be recognized as a grandparent or an aunt.

What we tested before writing this page

We ran a real page from a 1622 Amsterdam baptism register through the same extraction every upload uses. The page holds around sixty entries in four columns. A normal scan read a single entry: the father, the mother, the witness, the child and the officiating minister. A deep scan of the same page, which uses a stronger model and more credits, came back with sixty-six people from roughly a third of the entries on the page. That is one page, not an accuracy figure, and we are not claiming one.

What that means in practice. If you need one family from a crowded register page, crop to the entry before you upload it. If you want the whole page, use deep scan and check the result against the image.

From a scan to a connected profile

Reading the record is step one of four:

1. Upload the scan or photo.
2. Process it - KleioBase reads and translates the record and pulls out the people and events.
3. Review the result and fix anything the AI misread. Abbreviated patronymics and cramped register columns are where Dutch records get tricky, and the review step is where you stay in control.
4. Confirm it - KleioBase creates or updates person profiles and links the record to them.

Once confirmed, the ancestor who appears in a baptism, a marriage and a burial becomes one profile with every document attached. As the archive grows, KleioBase suggests likely duplicate people to merge and points out where a generation is still missing.

Why Dutch records are hard, and how the review step helps

Before fixed surnames became the rule in the Netherlands in 1811, the same man could be Jan Pietersz in one record, Jan Pieters in the next and Jan Pietersz van Delft in a third. Women kept their own names throughout, and witnesses are recorded without saying how they are related. Deciding that two entries are the same person is the real work.

KleioBase gives you a first reading and then hands you the controls. You confirm what is right and correct what is not, and nothing enters your archive until you do.