State Archives of Belgium

We are currently experiencing problems with our servers, causing a significant slowdown in the loading of images for our ‘Genealogical sources’ search engine. Our IT team is currently resolving the problem but unfortunately it is taking longer than expected. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

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.

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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.

• To the genealogical sources

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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