Opening hours:
- Tuesday to Thursday: 9 am to 4.30 pm.
(July and August: open from Tuesday till Thursday, from 9 am till 12 am and from 1 pm till 4.30 pm.) - Closed on Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, public holidays and inventorying days.
The reading room of the National Archives 2 - Joseph Cuvelier repository is accessible by appointment only. Reserve your place in the reading room by e-mail at least two working days before the desired date of visit.
Appointments are best requested several weeks in advance. Given the large number of requests in recent months and the reading room's limited capacity (max. 20 visitors), all seats are often fully booked several weeks in advance.
When making your reservation request, please also mention the inventory numbers of the documents you wish to consult. That way, we can prepare the documents for you and you can get started immediately when you arrive at the reading room.
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, Johannes Van de Walle, Marie Van Eeckenrode.
Heads of Research Projects:
- Project Metis-Resolutie: Kristien Geenen, Ornella Rovetta, Jeanne Garçia, Lilian Eyletters and Valentine Dewulf.
- Project Share: Bérengère Piret.
- Project DIGICOLJUST-2: Reinout Vander Hulst
- Research programme FED-tWIN Gusangira: Margot Luyckfasseel.
Reception, Reading Room and Stacks Management: Lynn Biscop, Jean-François Meert, Marie-Louise Oomen and Agnès Nyiramisago-Trouveroy.
Maintenance: Fatima Ait Laghchim, Fatima Chabira and Ionela Pandelica.
