Open Archives API

There's an OpenAPI YAML file for this API, which is also available in HTML and JSON.

A remote MCP server, based on https://api.openarchieven.nl/ and openarchieven-mcp-server, is available via https://mcp.openarchieven.nl/.

General

  • API calls are throttled per IP address to 4 requests per second, contact Open Archives to increase this value.
  • Please use a descriptive user-agent (with project url or e-mail) in your requests so we can contact you in case of curiousity or problems.
  • All output is in UTF-8 and cached (server-side and via max-age header) for a day, unless otherwise specified.

Records

  • Search v1.1 - searches the genealogical data set and returns the found persons (and records)
  • Match v1.0 - searches for records where a person identified by name and birthyear is mentioned
  • Show v1.1 - shows one specific genealogical record
  • Years ago v1.1 - lists people born years ago

Statistics

  • Archives v1.1 - statistics on open archives
  • Records v1.1 - statistics on records
  • Source types v1.1 - statistics on source types
  • Event types v1.1 - statistics on event types
  • Breakdown v1.1 - cross-tabulation aggregations across archive, source type, event type, place and year
  • Comments v1.1 - statistics on comments
  • FamilyNames v1.0 - statistics on family names
  • FirstNames v1.0 - statistics on first names
  • Profession v1.0 - statistics on professions

Related

  • Weather v1.0 - historical weather measurements
  • Census v1.0 - information about the Dutch population

Transcriptions

  • Search v1.1 - full-text search across page transcriptions of historical documents
  • Browse v1.1 - browse transcriptions by archive and inventory
  • Show v1.1 - retrieve a single transcription with its source citation

Build on Open Archive

The magic of Open Archieven lies not just in its millions of records, but in the tools, plugins, apps and integrations that third-party developers have built on top of them — explore them below, and get in touch if you've built one yourself.

Community Showcase

URI and Content Negotiation

Records presented on Open Archives all have an URI. This URI resolves to content based on Content Negotiation (by profile).

File exports

Open Archives shares all the data in down­loadable file exports (in CSV, XML and RDF).

Open Search

Open Archives provides search results as defined by the Open Search specification. There's an OpenSearch description docu­ment for each language: NL, EN, DE & FR.

Want to harvest the genealogical data?

Open Archives also provides an OAI-PMH data provider for harvesting.

Find your ancestors and publish your family tree on Genealogy Online via https://www.genealogieonline.nl/en/