Personal names

The resolutions of the States General mention tens of thousands of people, such as delegates, diplomatic envoys, members of other government bodies and lower government bodies, civil servants and many ordinary citizens who turned to the States General with petitions. In Goetgevonden, the names of these people are considered an entity.

This dataset contains a list of personal names that have been recognised as such in the resolutions of the States General. These are surnames, because most people in the resolutions were only mentioned by their surname.

An automatic process was used to recognise almost a million text elements in the resolutions as personal names. This initial list was then curated. Different variants of the same name were linked to one standard form. This reduced the number of personal names to approximately 6,000. These six thousand names together account for approximately half of the name mentions that appear in the resolutions. The rest of the name mentions concern names that only appear once or a few times. These are not part of this dataset.

The personal names recognised in the resolutions are not identified with persons. However, the entity browser does provide a suggestion as to which persons with the same surname the personal names may refer to, if information about these persons is available in the Repertory of Officials and Civil Servants and in the Repertories of Diplomatic Representatives in the Netherlands and Abroad.