A biography, by Robert P. Swierenga

Robert P. Swierenga was born in Chicago in 1935, the first child of John R. and Marie A. Swierenga. He was baptized in the Second Cicero (later Warren Park) Christian Reformed Church and attended Timothy Christian Grade School in Cicero and Chicago Christian High School in Engelwood.

Swierenga continued his studies at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the denominational college, and in 1957 received a B.A. degree in education with a major in history. He pursued graduate studies in history and earned the M.A. degree from Northwestern University in 1958 and the PhD degree from the University of Iowa in 1965. His doctoral thesis was a quantitative study of public land sales in early Iowa, which became his first book, Pioneers and Profits: Land Speculation on the Iowa Frontier (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968).

Between his masters and doctoral work, Swierenga taught Social Studies for three years in the Pella (IA) Christian High School (1958-1961). He then returned to teach at his alma mater on a one-year appointment (1961-62) before returning to Iowa to complete doctoral work, after which he returned to Calvin College. Here he completed the research on his second Iowa land book, Acres for Cents: Delinquent Tax Auctions in Frontier Iowa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976). Most significantly, while at Calvin Swierenga found a cache of Dutch immigration records in the Archives and turned his already considerable computer skills to these voluminous records. Thereafter, he redirected his research interests to the rich and much neglected subject of Dutch immigration, which he has pursued with vigor ever since. He is well known among genealogists for his six-volume set containing Netherlands emigration lists and Dutch-born in the U.S. ship passenger manifests and federal census records. Genealogists of the Dutch frequently tell each other to "consult Swierenga," meaning the big blue books published by Scholarly Resources (Wilmington, DE) in the 1980s.

After three years at Calvin (1965-1968), Swierenga accepted a position as professor of history in Kent State University, where he taught for twenty-eight years. He was on the Kent State campus the infamous day of May 4th, 1970, when the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four Kent State students, one of whom had attended his classes. This tragedy left an indelible mark on the young professor and deepened his commitment to students. At Kent State, Swierenga directed 19 masters theses and 23 doctoral dissertations, a number of which dealt with the subject of immigration.

During his graduate studies at the University of Iowa, Swierenga became one of the first historians to use quantitative and computer-aided research methods in the study of history. In 1970, while at Kent State, he published one of the first graduate seminar texts in this new field, Quantification in American History: Theory and Methods (New York: Atheneum Press). In 1976 Swierenga helped organize the Social Science History Association and co-edited the association's journal, Social Science History (1976-1991). He also participated in many of the annual meetings by presenting papers on his research or commenting on the work of other scholars.

Swierenga was a Fulbright Fellow at Leiden University in the Netherlands in 1976 and again in 1985. In 1991 he returned to Europe to teach one semester at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Willard Wichers, Netherlands consul in Holland, Michigan, and a strong supporter of Dutch history and culture, was instrumental in helping him obtain the 1976 Silver Jubilee Fellowship, a special award in honor of the American Bicentennial. These fellowships enabled Swierenga to canvass libraries and archives for documents relating to Dutch immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century.

As a result, he has been called the "dean" of Dutch immigration studies. His magnum opus, Faith and Family: Dutch Immigration and Settlement in the United States, 1820-1920, is just coming off the press of Holmes & Meier, a New York publishing house. This is his fourteenth book and the seventh on Dutch immigration. He has also published 125 scholarly articles in professional journals and collected works, more than one-half on the Dutch.

In 1996, after a successful career at Kent State, Swierenga took early retirement to become research professor in the Van Raalte Institute, where he lectures and writes on the general subject of the Dutch in America. He co-published with Elton Bruins Family Quarrels in the Dutch Reformed Churches of the Nineteenth Century (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999), and he is finishing the first full length study of the Dutch community of Chicago, tentatively entitled "Chicago's Groninger Hoek: The Dutch Reformed of the Old West Side." His own roots are in there and also those of Peter J. Huizenga, the patron of the Van Raalte Institute. At Hope College, Swierenga has found his place; he likens his position to being on a "permanent sabbatical." What could be sweeter for a scholar than to have uninterrupted time to study a subject that is wholly captivating and enlightening.

Swierenga is the husband of Joan Swierenga-Boomker, father of five children and grandfather of five. He and Joan are members of the Pillar Christian Reformed Church in Holland, of which the colony's founder, the Reverend A.C. Van Raalte, was the first pastor (1847-1867). It is wholly appropriate that the A.C. Van Raalte Research Professor at Hope College should be a member of the historic Van Raalte church that adjoins the campus.