Who are we?

	Margarethus van Osnabrugge (Willem's uncle), b. 9 August 1911, Harmelen, Netherlands. Highschool teacher. d. 12 October 1992, Zutphen. Netherlands. Margarethus was a researcher for most of his life. Long before the days of the internet, he would cycle to towns and villages and decipher church and council records to trace families or chuch histories. He did the lion's share of the 1600- 1990 genealogy research on our families. Some of his research was published in Gens Nostra (available in the Documents on this website) and books on the history of Harmelen, Zutphen and the Dutch Reformed Church.
	Mark van Osnabrugge (Willem's son) Mark only lived in Holland from age 4 - 9, but has always been interested in its culture and history. Since 2008 he has done the majority of the work researching the v. Ossenbroich/bruch family back to 1200 and finding connections to thousands of other important families and events.
	Willem van Osnabrugge, b. 27 October 1943, Harmelen, Netherlands. Director of Flavor Development. Retired at 55. Lives in Florida, USA. Willem developed an increased interest in his family history after his retirement. He researched and traced his family tree back to William the Conqueror and Charlemagne through some of the female ancestors. He developed and maintains this website (and others).

We are descendants of Aert van O. (b.~ 1545). However, if we go through some maternal ancestry lines, then we go back to the Counts of Holland, William the Conqueror and Charlemagne and many more. View our Pedigree charts here: one, two.
Go here if you prefer a more pictorial story of our journey back in time.

Research and Development
The construction of a family tree is not simply copying names and dates from other records and then presenting it in text, graphics or in combinations.
Very often, especially in the times when only hand-written records existed, names were written phonetically -in all kinds of variations- or quite illegibly. Books, printed in the 1800s, often had their dates and (first) names wrong about families living hundreds of years earlier.
The construction of a family tree is therefore like working on a big puzzle. Correlating names, dates, places -all in various spellings- from many different records sources. It is a never ending endeavor to make all the pieces fit together perfectly.

Software
We have tried most software programs, but now mainly use GenoPro to record all our new research findings and link the pieces in a complex puzzle. It is our favorite genealogy software program, since it allows you to visually create your trees and place and drag persons and notes on various "tableaus". View here a screenshot of a small segment. Here a screenshot of a small part of the "Arnhem" tab.
For routine entering of data -and adding geographical info and maps- we use Legacy. From those resulting data (gedcoms), we then use the online "TNG" database on our server to present graphs, tables and individual personalia on this website.