How to research a house in Amsterdam
The BAG building registry — with real construction years — the Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Delpher's historic newspapers, and the Kadaster: a guide to tracing an Amsterdam canal house or brick gable back through the centuries.
By The Plot Team · May 26, 2026 · 4 min read
The Netherlands records its buildings with a precision that puts most countries to shame — and Amsterdam, a city that has been numbering, taxing, and drawing its houses since the Golden Age, is the showcase. There's a genuine luxury here that's rare in house research: you can often learn the real year a building was constructed in a single free lookup. Here's how to trace an Amsterdam house, from that first fact down to the canal-house gable.
Start with the building: the BAG (and a real build year)
The Dutch keep a national Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen (BAG) — the buildings and addresses registry — and it carries each building's oorspronkelijkbouwjaar, its original year of construction. This is the prize. Through the official PDOK geocoding service (free, no key), you can resolve an Amsterdam address and pull that build year directly — which is exactly what Plot does for Dutch addresses, so the design era rests on a recorded construction date rather than a guess. For a centuries-old canal house the BAG year can be remarkably early; treat a very old year as a strong fact but cross-check it against the maps and the Stadsarchief, since rebuilds behind a preserved façade happen.
Ownership: the Kadaster
The Dutch land registry, the Kadaster (operating since 1832), holds the ownership chain — transfers, mortgages, parcel boundaries. It is authoritative and complete, but not free: ownership information (Eigendomsinformatie) is sold per title, and there's no free address-level deed API. The Kadaster's older OAT (Oorspronkelijke Aanwijzende Tafels — the original 1832 cadastral registers) and minute maps, however, are archival and increasingly digitised, and they record the first registered owners and parcels of the 1830s.
The Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Amsterdam's municipal archive, the Stadsarchief, is one of the great city archives of Europe — and a great deal of it is online and free. It holds the kwijtscheldingen (the old transfer registers of the city, recording property conveyances back to the 16th and 17th centuries, before the national Kadaster existed), tax registers, the bevolkingsregister (population registers, the Dutch equivalent of a rolling census, from the 19th century), building permits, and an immense photographic collection. The Stadsarchief's indexen are searchable by name; its Bouwdossiers (building files) can yield original construction drawings for a specific address. For deep Amsterdam house history, this is the room.
The people: civil registration and population registers
Dutch burgerlijke stand (civil registration) began under French rule in 1811; before that, baptisms, marriages, and burials are in the DTB church registers, many reaching the 1600s. Both are indexed (with scans) free through WieWasWie and Open Archieven, searchable by name and place. The bevolkingsregister at the Stadsarchief is especially powerful for a house, because it tracked who lived at an address over time — closer to a continuous occupancy record than a once-a-decade census.
Historic press: Delpher
For newspapers, the Netherlands has Delpher, the free digitised-newspaper platform of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB). Its coverage is deep, and it's freely searchable — search your street as a phrase and you'll surface property advertisements, familieberichten (family notices), and news naming Amsterdam addresses. Delpher is the live press source Plot queries for Dutch addresses, pulling street mentions straight from the KB's digitised newspaper articles.
Maps and the listed monuments
Amsterdam is gorgeously mapped. The Stadsarchief and the national map collections hold centuries of city plans, and historic cadastral maps show parcels building by building. For protected status, the national Rijksmonumenten register (and the municipal gemeentelijke monumenten) record listed buildings — and Amsterdam's grachtengordel, the canal ring, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, so many houses there carry monument status with a description attached. These designations surface for Dutch addresses through Plot's cross-referenced records layer (Wikidata and OpenStreetMap both carry Rijksmonument tags).
How Plot helps in Amsterdam
For an Amsterdam address, Plot builds a real page: it resolves the address through the official PDOK geocoder, recovers the BAG original build year where it exists, searches Delpher for historic press naming your street, surfaces nearby monument designations through the records layer, and gathers Wikimedia imagery. It's honest that the Kadaster ownership chain is paid and that the Stadsarchief's deepest registers are consulted in the archive — but it assembles the freely available layer, build year and all, in a minute.