My name is Jacques Dunselman. Since 1999 I'm the owner of the Dunselman.com domain. I was surprised by the number of Dunselman family members who contacted me through the site just out of curiosity (while searching the Internet for "Dunselman"). Though we didn't know each other, we could trace that we share the same ancestors. To solve the riddle of our relation, I have often consulted the orange booklet "Dunselman-Abbenhausen" from 1974 that was written by my aunt Agnes Dunselman-Borgers, together with her husband Jos Dunselman.

When I approached my aunt Agnes in the spring of 2001 with the proposal to make the family tree available online, she enthusiastically started to (manually!) convert all data from the little orange booklet...

At the same time I started to design the Dunselman Network web site. Two years later, in June 2003, the Dunselman Network was officially launched. Soon we had over 50 registered users, most of which also applied for the free dunselman.net e-mail address.

The problem however with a custom-designed site, is that even a little change like adding an article can take hours of work. But enter Web 2.0 and the open-source software community. There now are complete content management systems available that allow easy configuration to one's wishes and provide the basic services (like membership registration) that I had previously programmed myself. What a time-saver!

The new site, which has been released in May 2010, has been built on the Joomla Content Management System with the Community Builder extension. Once you've registered, you will also be able to modify the family tree directly and update the records for family members close to you.

We hope you enjoy the rejuvinated site as much as we do!

Jacques Dunselman and Agnes Dunselman-Borgers