Emigrants from
Drenthe, the Netherlands
to Michigan, 1845-1872
by Ger de Leeuw

In March 2006, Wij, Eenvoudige Drentse Lui: Landverhuizers uit Drenthe (We, Simple Drenthish Folk: Emigrants from Drenthe, ISBN-10:90-75115-39-3) by historian Ger de Leeuw was published in the Netherlands.The hardcover book with 269 pages, including illustrations and maps, tells the story of emigrants from the province, their reasons for emigrating, and their experiences after arriving in West Michigan. Among the useful data sets in the book, is a list of all those emigrants, 1845-1872. De Leeuw provided a copy of this list of the 370 families or individuals to Heritage Hall in an Excel spreadsheet. We subsequently translated the data into English and reformatted them into the PDF file linked to this page. Mr. De Leeuw can be contacted via email.

Each entry contains the name of the person, age, occupation, community of origin, family size (unless traveling alone) religion, economic status, and reason for emigration. Surnames were reformatted and alphabetized according to English conventions, thus "Haar, Berend ter" in the original is included here as "ter Haar, Berend."

Emigrants from Drenthe

Richard H. Harms
© 2006

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