Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État
The State Archives of Belgium, which hold the parish registers and the civil status registers for the whole country — the thing a Belgian search actually needs, and which this atlas was pointing at Geneanet for. WHAT WAS VERIFIED AND WHAT WAS NOT, on 23 Sep 2026: arch.be itself opens. Its genealogical search has moved to agatha.arch.be, which arch.be links to and which would not answer us at all — it completes a TLS handshake and then closes the connection, to a script and to a browser alike. The old host, search.arch.be, is retired and answers 200 for every path with an end-of-life notice, including the three URLs the State Archives' own «Search engines» page still links to. `account` is the class because consulting the scans requires a free registration; that is documented rather than tested here, and this note is the honest record of which.
Last checked 2026-09-23. Tell us if this has changed.
The ground it holds
Record regions whose registers are filed here, and for which years.
- 1563–1713 Spanish Netherlands
- 1713–1795 Austrian Netherlands
- 1795–1815 French annexation — THE HINGE OF BELGIAN RESEARCH. France annexes the ground in 1795 and civil registration — the état civil, births, marriages and deaths recorded by the commune — begins in 1796. Before that date there is no state record of a birth anywhere in the country, only a baptism. After it there are two independent series for every person, which is why Belgian research is unusually tractable.
- 1815–1830 United Kingdom of the Netherlands
- 1830–1914 Kingdom of Belgium — THE TRAP IS THAT THERE IS NO CENTRAL ARCHIVE TO WRITE TO. The State Archives keep the registers in provincial repositories — Antwerp, Beveren, Bruges, Ghent, Hasselt, Kortrijk, Leuven, Liège, Mons, Namur, Tournai, Arlon, Eupen — and a request addressed to Brussels for a parish in Limburg goes to the wrong building. The population registers, kept by the commune from 1846, follow a household from address to address and are the other half of the work.
- 1914–1918 German occupation
- 1918–1940 Kingdom of Belgium
- 1940–1944 German occupation
- 1944–2026 Kingdom of Belgium
This map knows Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État covers BE, but nobody has walked its catalogue into the shelf. That is a gap in this map, not a gap in the record. Help fill it →