Opening hours:
- From Tuesday to Thursday: from 9 am till 12 am and from 1 pm till 4.30 pm.
- Closed on Monday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, public holidays and inventorying days.
- Access by reservation only via agr_ar_2@arch.be. Reservations by phone or on-site are not possible. Please include the inventory numbers of the documents you wish to consult when making your reservation.
- Reservation: at least 2 working days in advance; due to high demand, we recommend booking several weeks ahead.
- Capacity: maximum 20 visitors per day.
- Documents: up to 20 inventory numbers can be requested per day, also at least 2 working days in advance. No documents will be prepared on the day of the visit.
The inventory of the so-called “Moscow Archives” has recently been completed. These Moscow archives are housed in the National Archives 2 - Joseph Cuvelier repository. Starting today, they can be consulted in our reading room.
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.
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.
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.
Head of Service: Joachim Derwael.
Archivists: Luis Angel Bernardo y Garcia, Jan Naert, Caroline Six and Marie Van Eeckenrode.
Heads of Research Projects:
- Project Metis-Resolutie: Aline Cuvelier, Valentine Dewulf, Margot Elmer, Lilian Eyletters, Jeanne Garçia and Ornella Rovetta
- Project Share: Bérengère Piret.
- Project DIGICOLJUST-2: Reinout Vander Hulst
- Project CoSo: Davy Verbeke and Ines Glogowski
Reception, Reading Room and Stacks Management: Lynn Biscop, Jean-François Meert, Marie-Louise Oomen and Agnès Nyiramisago-Trouveroy.
Maintenance: Fatima Ait Laghchim and Fatima Chabira.
