Where are pre-1700 wills or other probate records for Amsterdam or Noord-Holland?

Question

I would like to search for wills or equivalent documents for people who lived in Amsterdam in the mid-1600s. Where might I find such records? The closest collection I see in the Gemeente Asterdam Stadsarchief is called 'Boedelpapieren' (estate papers), but doesn't seem to have a lot of wills, unless I'm not recognizing them. Is that collection the right place to search? 

FamilySearch.org has a page on NL probate records, but when searching the FamilySearch catalog for Amsterdam or Noord-Holland, I don't find a section on probate records, and the sections on court and notarial records don't seem to have what I'm looking for. A catalog search for the Netherlands has a section for probate records and one for indexes, but the few items listed are later than my timeframe and/or not for Amsterdam.

Related question: How common were wills in mid-17th-century Amsterdam?

Regards,

Chris

Answer 1

Hi Chris,

Wills (Testamenten) are a subset of the "Notariële archieven" (Notary archives) in the Stadsarchief. Unfortunately there is no filter on "Testamenten".

So without a name or date filter the number of hits is staggering. Just filtering 1640-1660 gets you a resultset of 128,845...

Also, please be aware that transcripting these documents requires sound paleographic knowledge of 17th century Dutch handwriting.

Comments

A bit of positive news: the Stadsarchief is implementing Transkribus (HTR - Handwritten Text Recognition) software to do the transcription of notarial deeds.

See this G2G post. You can try it here.

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Hi Chris & Jan,

I disagree. there is a filter "testament" under the tab "Soort Akte".

The result set is brought down to 1157.

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You are right, Jan Simon. I never noticed, thank you for correcting!

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Thanks to both of you! I looked at the Transkribus sample, and it seems worth the effort. A lot of words don't come out in a form that Google Translate can understand without being modified, but it gets enough words to be helpful, especially since it's so fast.

As wills are in Notarial Papers, what kinds of documents are in Boedelpapieren? Are they government/court records, or private documents that have been collected by the Achief? 

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The Stadsarchief help says (translated):

Estate papers are papers from the parental estate of an orphaned child. It can concern a wide variety of documents. In addition to documents related to the parents, such as marriage certificates and burial records (cemeteries) of the parents, inventories of the division and/or sale of the parental estate, the files may also contain personal papers of the orphan. These are, for example, a certificate of baptism, proof of vaccination against cowpox and registration of a male orphan for military service.

These estate papers come from the archives

of the Reformed Municipality in Amsterdam,

specifically from the archives of the Diaconie orphanage

(inventory numbers 465-683).

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Possibly of interest are the "Boedelinventaris" (Estate inventory") and "Boedelscheiding" (Estate settlement) documents, both also subsets of the Notarial archives.

Answer 2

Jan,  could you please comment on my rephrased query: Where are pre-1650 wills or other probate records for Leiden/Haarlem or Nordholland??  including orphan records, and remarriage of the widow?  Thanks.

Comments

Louise,

I think openarchives would be a good candidate, further limiting the resultset of the queries below with more filters like name or smaller timeframe:

Leiden

Haarlem

Noord-Holland: no province filter available, but filtering on other items available, like searching notarial records in Alkmaar, 1640-1650

In all cases you obviously only get those records that were indexed by name. There probably are far more books yet unindexed, browsable at municipal, regional and provincial archives and on FamilySearch films.

And of course you can always ask for help here on G2G, tagging "Netherlands"!