In 2008 the Royal Academy for Dutch Language and Literature (KANTL) has commissioned its research cell, the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB), to build a corpus containing 15th and 16th century ego documents, hence aiming to extend existing mediaeval text corpora in time. In this paper I will discuss the existing 13th and 14th century corpora (1) and the need to extend them in time (2). Then I will give an overview of various similar initiatives for the subsequent periods (3). Finally, I will reveal how the CTB/KANTL plans to add to these during the current project (4). This means that I will transfer selection criteria of other types of non-literary texts (charters) to autobiographical text (so-called ego documents). I will also discuss some examples of manuscripts that are eligible for this kind of research according to these selection criteria. A modest case study involving one of these ego documents will conclude this paper (5).