Book a seat here:
- in the reading room of the National Archives via the online booking form
- at another State Archives repository by e-mail
In the week of 16 December 2024, the search engine ‘Archive inventories’ in the new search environment AGATHA will be launched. It will replace the search engine ‘Search in archives’ from the old search environment SEARCH.
Please note: on 23 December 2024, the old search environment SEARCH (https://search.arch.be/) will be completely deactivated and will therefore no longer be accessible! Users, who still surf to the old search website, will automatically be redirected to AGATHA.
On Thursday 26 January 2023, the charter of Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders, which was kept in the Benedictine Abbey of Messines (Mesen) in West Flanders, and which had disappeared at the beginning of the First World War, was officially handed over to the State Archives of Belgium. The charter had resurfaced at The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City (The Met) in December 2016. In early 2020, The Met agreed return this precious document, which is part of our cultural heritage, to Belgium.
In the context of the launch of the genealogical website (in the autumn of 2022), certain digitised parish registers or registers of civil status will be temporarily unavailable. We thank you for your understanding and apologize in advance for this inconvenience! In addition, we would like to point out that six months after the launch of this new website, the current inventories in the search engine (ordered by province and municipality) will be taken offline. The digitised registers can then only be consulted via the genealogical website. Concretely, this means that the current URLs will disappear. If you have made a link to these registers (in a family tree or on a website), this will have to be adapted after the launch of the website.
The State Archives and the Royal Museum for Central Africa have published a source guide to the history of colonisation. This new publication identifies and locates all archives available in Belgium dating from the colonial period of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. The book in two volumes is also accessible online.
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