News » Make the link between miller and mill, use the Ten Bruggencate number

Do you have millers in your family tree? Or do you come across records in which a miller is mentioned? And do you know - through archival research - in which mill he (or she) was active? Then make a link between the miller and the mill via the mill's unique Ten Bruggencate number. Genealogy Online and Open Archives offer extra functionality for this, in collaboration with the association De Hollandsche Molen.

On the website of the association De Hollandsche Molen you will find information about all mills in the Netherlands, existing and disappeared. With many images, archival documents, literature and construction drawings, Allemolens.nl (in Dutch) is a good starting point for all your mill research. But little is known about the millers who (built and) ran the mills...

As a family tree researcher you can change that. Your own family tree will often contain one or more persons who were millers by profession. On Genealogy Online there are more than 55 thousand millers (Dutch: molenaar). Or millers' wives, millers' servants, water millers, corn millers, sawmillers, hulling millers, flour millers, oil millers, etc. If you know, based on source research, the exact mill, then include (in your family tree program) at least the 5-digit Ten Bruggencate number of the mill (sometimes supplemented with a letter) in the note to the occupation, using the Dutch notation, for example "Ten Bruggencatenummer 03525". You can find these unique mill numbers on the website allemolens.nl.

If Genealogy Online finds a Ten Bruggencate number in the note to the occupation, a link to the website allemolens.nl is automatically added to your publication, where additional information about the mill can be found. See for example the page about Jan Kuijper from the publication Genealogie Kuijper or one of the other mill references found on Genealogy Online.

Adding the Ten Bruggencate number means that a link can be made between your data and the mill collection! The "links" between millers and mills can in turn be used by the association De Hollandsche Molen to update the documentation of the mills.

The advice to add the Ten Bruggencate number also applies to records on Open Archives with millers. If, in your research on Open Archives, you come across a miller (or variant) of whom you know in which mill he (or she) was active, then include this in the comment on the record so that other researchers can benefit from it. If you for example include "Ten Bruggencatenummer 04420" in the comment (and of course a source reference for the link), Open Archives will recognize this and display an allemolens.nl link and logo. See for example the comment on the marriage record of Wolter Sebes van der Molen and Jantien Bartels, he was the miller of the mill De Hazewind in Gieten (Ten Bruggencate number 04420).

If you have a publication on Genealogy Online, you will see a new notification block on the management page of your publication:

This leads to a page listing all millers in your publication (read: persons for whom you entered miller in the occupation field), followed by the Ten Bruggencate number if you have already included it in the note to the occupation. The overview can serve to stimulate your research into mills and millers: dive into the polder archives, notarial archives and other sources in which mills and their millers are mentioned. Please note: the Ten Bruggencate number must be entered in your own family tree program as a note to the occupation of the person in question; via the GEDCOM export the links between miller and mill will then appear in your publication on Genealogy Online.

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