- NIMH
- Genealogy
Genealogical research into former Royal Netherlands Navy personnel
The Netherlands Institute for Military History (NIMH) provides the following primary sources for genealogical research:
Navy personnel born between approximately 1865 and 1908
The files relate to regular personnel only. To be able to find information about a person, you must have the correct date of birth. You can use the list of personnel files (pdf) to find out whether there is a file on the person you are looking for. The content of those files can vary strongly: some of them contain no more than a card with the name and rank of the person in question, while other files yield bulky collections of documents and papers describing an entire life.
Navy personnel born after 1908
For service records of Royal Netherlands Navy personnel born after 1908, you may contact:
Ministry van Defense
Registration and Information on Ex-service Personnel Office (BRIOP)
P.O. Box 7000,
6460 NC Kerkrade
The Netherlands
For this information, the date of birth of the person you are looking for is also required. In addition, you must include a copy of your identity paper to prove that you are related to that person.
The personnel documentation is composed of various sources with (genealogical) information about thousands of naval officers from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. List of personnel documentation (pdf).
A collection containing data taken from the personnel registry of the navy.
Collection, relating to personnel who died in active service between 1940 and 1985.
Payrolls from naval vessels from the Second World War.
Registers from the permanent maritime officers' corps from the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Commemorative books and other retrospective publications, listing all midshipmen enrolled at the naval colleges in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
So-called gentlemen’s books from the eighteenth century, listing names of naval officers.
Luc Eekhout, 'Het admiralenboek: de vlagofficieren van de Nederlandse marine 1382-1991' (Amsterdam 1992)('The book of admirals: the flag officers of the Netherlands Navy 1382-1991').
Research into sea-going naval personnel born before 1850 is somewhat more difficult, because a lot of archive material was destroyed in a fire at the Ministry of the Navy in 1844. Other institutions that are useful for research into sea-going naval personnel in the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century are:
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