The IISH has been hosting the Historical Image Archive on Migrants on its website for several years. Sometimes this project yield archival material well, such as on the Slovenian and Yugoslav miners community in the Netherlands.
Around 1900, coal mines started to be built rapidly in the South of the Netherlands. Workers were recruited from the adjacent German coal basin. In addition to Germans, Poles, Italians and Slovenians were hired. Most were from the area of Ljubljana and from Celje, to the East. They founded their own Santa Barbara Association, and between 1926 and 1929 associations dedicated to promoting spiritual welfare and national Slovenian awareness and to protecting social interests were established in seven Dutch mining communities. While most were Roman Catholic, one was socialist and another even communist. In the heyday of mining 4,000 Slovenians worked in the South of Limburg. Now, most of their descendants are fully integrated.
The collection Sloveense Arbeidsmigranten in Limburg comprises several personal papers of miners and their families (passports, logbooks, and letters of reference), as well as papers from the variegated association activities. In addition, detailed lists are available of all Yugoslavs who lived in South Limburg in 1949, even indicating the political antecedents of several of them during World War II and their subsequent political affiliations. The collection was transferred to the Sociaal-Historisch Centrum Limburg in 2016.
Text was taken from On the Waterfront - newsletter of the Friends of the IISH Issue 13 (pdf, 1.35 Mb).