Building digital bridges between Amsterdam and New York City

The founding of New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan by the Dutch, has left lots of archival traces in both the United States of America and the Netherlands. In the project New Amsterdam Stories, archival collections from both sides of the Atlantic are brought together online.

New Amsterdam Stories
The New Amsterdam Stories project is a collaboration between the New York City Municipal Archives and the Stadsarchief Amsterdam (Amsterdam Municipal Archives), and is also funded by DutchCulture, DutchCulture USA, the National Archives of the Netherlands and the New Netherland Institute. Both of the municipal archives are working to digitise and make available 17th-century records related to New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlement which later became New York City. By linking their documents, they seek to make their archival collections available to wider audiences and establish opportunities for greater research.

Renewed website
On the renewed website you can read about merchants, traders and government officials who moved to the New World to build their lives in the capital of New Netherland. Archival records – business contracts, loan agreements, wills, deeds, court transcripts and more – illuminate details from their lives in Dutch New York, and reveal the shared cultural heritage between the United States and the Netherlands.