An examination of the membership catalogues of the Walloon and Huguenot Church of Leiden (the Waalskerk) confirmed what I had already noted from viewing the microfiches at the Buro for Genealogical Research at the Hague, i.e. that a goodly number of Protestants from the French city of Amiens were present,permanently or temporarily, in the Dutch city in the period from 1586-1685, the century preceding the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The names and dates of the newcomers from Amiens were recorded in the membership catalogs and the fact they were admitted to the congregation on the recommendation of the church of Amiens. I also learned that clusters of immigrants from Amiens arrived around a few distinct dates, which clearly reflected some sort of crisis in the Amiens congregation, and  also that some immigrants seemed to have gone back and forth sometimes repeatedly and were therefore repetitively admitted to membership. Some immigrants traveled with spouses, generally also identified by name. French women by the way did not take the last name of their husbands, though the couple's children did. But beyond these particulars the membership books did not reveal any of the particulars of existence for the immigrants.

The remarkable fact about the Leiden archives however is that other types of records are also extant and give us more insight into their lives in Leiden.  The Amiens protestant church records are also helpful in some respects in perspectivizing that side of the story. The amazing amount and quality of online resources to be found on the Leiden erfgoed website combined with the remarkable work of genealogists like Jouke de Vries and, for the French family histories, by Jean-Paul and Chantal Roelly and the Departmental Archives of the Somme has enabled a lot of these detailed investigations as has my own original research. In 2022 the Antiquary Society of Picardy in its Bulletin published an initial study in which I sought to give some sense of the amplitude and rhythm of the migration. It was titled “Born in Amiens and Married in Leiden: Protestant emigres to the Netherlands in the century preceding the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. You may access this here. I'm going to use the engagement records and various sources in what follows to better understand the world of the Amiens immigrants in Leiden, starting with the first 20 engagement acts involving one or both of the engaged described as “natives of Amiens.” For me they represent “pioneers” of the slow exodus that developed across the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Ondertrouw acts : notices of intent to marry required to be filed with the civil authorities before a marriage. The inscriptions are in Dutch, sometimes giving rise to curious spellings of names, e.g. Marie Kinjon in the ondertrouw register = Marie Quignon. 

Regarding the phrase "from Amiens", the expression in the ondertrouw acts should be taken to mean "native of Amiens" rather than just "arriving from Amiens." The actual marriage records of the Walloon Church use the terms “natif d’Amiens” and “native d’Amiens.”

The images below have been downloaded from the splendid online archive of the Regional Archives of Leiden.