Pete's Log: Remote Genealogy in Limburg

Entry #2383, (Genealogy)
(posted when I was 45 years old.)

As previously mentioned, my dad's family has deep roots in Overpelt. Both his parents, three of his four grandparents and eight of his sixteen great-great-grandparents were born there.

The usual candidates like FamilySearch don't seem to have any collections for that area, but I've found a few dedicated local resources:

  • Genealogie Overpelt
    A site that has taken Overpelt church records from 1592-1800 and civil records from 1798-1922 and built an extensive set of family trees out of those records.
  • GeneaPage Noord-Limburg
    A more extensive site that covers Northern Limburg, where Overpelt is located. It appears to use the same parochial and civil records, but also has additional data such as occupations for some people.

Both sites list their sources at a high level, but not for any individual records. I do have some primary sources such as my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ marriage certificates that I can compare and the data seems to match.

Also anytime a particular family line goes back to somewhere outside Belgium, other records also seem to match. So the data seems decent for being secondary sources. And it gives me an idea of what to look for if I ever find myself in Overpelt able to browse the originals.

One aspect of the primary sources being birth, baptism, marriage and death records is that the actual relationships have to be inferred. Overpelt seems small enough that this isn’t usually an issue but occasionally there are multiple people with the same name and sometimes my two sources appear to pick differing records to attach to a person.

GEDCOM, and thus webtrees, let you have multiple “facts” such as multiple deaths, each supported by a different source.

A screenshot showing the details of an ancestor. There are two separate death records, one in 1953 with an accompanying burial (sourced to GeneaPage Noord-Limburg) and one in 1961 sourced to Genealogie Overpelt

So until I find definitive evidence either way, I can keep both. What is trickier is when my two sources choose different parents for the same individual. Currently I am choosing to let that be a cutoff for that branch of the family until I can find other sources that can break the tie.