search open archives (open archieven, nl) genealogical records by name, place, and event
domain: openarchieven.nl · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
No API key/registration required for basic use — send requests with a descriptive User-Agent identifying your project or contact email
Call GET https://api.openarchieven.nl/1.1/records/search.json passing parameters such as eventplace, lastname, firstname, eventtype, eventdate
Use records/show.json?archive=<id>&identifier=<id> to fetch one specific record's full detail in JSON, XML, GEDCOM, Turtle, or N-Triples format
Use records/match.json to check whether a named person with a birth year appears in the dataset
For bulk/harvest use cases, use the OAI-PMH provider documented at openarchieven.nl/api/docs/oai-pmh/ instead of per-record calls
Known gotchas
Calls are throttled to 4 requests/second per IP by default; contact Open Archives to request a higher limit
There is no formal API key system, so identify yourself via User-Agent — anonymous/undocumented traffic risks harsher throttling
Coverage is limited to participating Dutch regional archives' indexed records, not a complete national index — related sites like wiewaswie.nl have no public API of their own and are not the same dataset
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