Opening hours:
- From September to June, from Tuesday to Friday: 9:00-16:30 (Documents requested in the reading room are delivered at 9:15, 10:15, 11:15, 13:15, 14:15 and 15:15).
- In July and August, from Tuesday to Friday: 9:00-12:00 and 13:00-16:30. Closed between 12:00 and 13:00.
- Closed from Monday 17 to Friday 21 November 2025 for Inventorying.
- Please book your seat in the reading room by e-mail at least 2 working days in advance.
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.
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.
Due to the Covid 19 crisis, the State Archives are forced to temporarily adjust their services on Saturdays. So far, four reading rooms were open to the public on the first Saturday of the month: in Mons, Namur, Liège and Arlon. For the next four months, the reading rooms in the aforementioned State Archives will also be closed on the first Saturday of the month. This means September 5th , October 3rd, November 7th and December 5th. A possible reopening at the beginning of 2021 will be communicated in good time. Thank you for your understanding.
The State Archives holds a real treasure of cartographic materials, but handing out original maps and plans in the reading rooms bears the risk of deteriorating the state of conservation of these documents. Indeed, repeated unrolling and rolling-up of these maps and plans that are sometimes of considerable size has taken its toll on the documents, which called for a large-scale digitization campaign. In recent years, some 60,000 maps and plans were digitised. This number increases steadily. Roughly 44,000 of these digital images have been processed and are now available for research.
Two hundred years ago, on 18 June 1815, the famous battle of Waterloo was fought. The State Archives conserves hundreds of linear metres of records from this period that can be searched with archive guides, inventories, historical studies, etc. A number of events are also organised this year in relation with the commemorations.
In order to let the general public discover the rich archival heritage on the First World War, the State Archives launched a new dedicated website in August 2014: http://14-18-wallonie.arch.be. It is filled with a variety of interesting documents, including letters, posters, photographies, minutes, etc. The website is in French.
Head of Service: Laurent Honnoré.
Archivist: Pierre-Jean Niebes.
Head of Research Projects: SATURN : Abdlemjid Assif.
Reception, Reading Room and Stacks Management: Loïc Burelle, Laurent Mothy, Damien Pontegnie, Stéphane Vanleynseele, Valérie Vincent.
Maintenance: Elly Hoencamp, Sabrina Miceli, Sibel Uysal.
