Welcome to de-zwijger.nl

Is your surname

?

You might be a direct descendant of William of Orange!

Choose the menu option "William of Orange", or use the search function to start your voyage through his family.

De Zwijger

William of Orange (1533-1584), Prince of Orange, Duke of Nassau-Dillenburg, nicknamed Willem de Zwijger (William the Silent), is considered the founding father of the Netherlands. He led the revolt against the Spanish King and laid the foundation for the indepedent Netherlands.

The descendants

In 2023 I discovered that I'm a descendant in the 14th generation of William of Orange, through my mother's family. Not really special, because the man had at least sixteen children (from five different women), so it's possible there are thousands of descendants in and around the Netherlands.

As far as I know, nobody ever investigated how many descendants really exist. That's why I made it a personal mission. This site is the result of my search.

The site

These pages show the intermediate results of my search. The amount of branches to document is enormous, so I'll probably never finish the job.

I do not show my sources on this site. Of course I do keep them in my personal database. Send me an email for inquiries.

To protect the privacy of living individuals, this site does not show the following cases:

• individuals who died less than 50 years ago
• living individuals who were born less than 100 years ago

Only one of these conditions is enough to not show the individual and his or her children on this site.

Are you looking for yourself?

Because my source files also contain individuals that will not be shown on this site, it's possible that I've found you as a descendant of William of Orange. In the near future, I will offer a safe way to find this out.

In short this will mean that:

• you register an account on this site
• you prove your identity to me
• I manually look for you in my source files
• I unlock you and your (grand)parents, so you can see this data on the site

I have to come up with a secure system, so no one can impersonate you to get to your data. I'm working on that.

Until then, there's enough to discover in the parental of William of Orange.

Wouter J. Boers, Groningen, the Netherlands.

Credits

• frameworks: NextJS, Tailwind CSS
• hosting: Vercel
• database: Firebase Firestore
• authentication: Firebase Authentication
• UI components: DaisyUI
• icons: FontAwesome
• flags: flag-icons
• search algorithm: Jaro-Winkler