Record Atlas
Belgium · 0 volumes

Tertre

Tertre in Belgium. 0 record volumes and who holds them.

Last changed 2026-10-11 · first mapped 2026-10-07 Follow what changes.

Comes out as a sheet for the reading room — what to ask for, who holds it, and every link written out in full.

This place

Where to begin

You know your family came from Tertre. Here is the order I would work in, cheapest and easiest first — and what to do when that runs out.

  1. Work out which country your year belongs to

    This is the step almost everybody skips, and it is the commonest reason a record that exists cannot be found. The ground did not move; the border did. A baptism here in one decade may sit in a different country's archive from one twenty years later.

    YearsWho governedWhose archive
    1563–1713 Spanish Netherlands Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch
    1713–1795 Austrian Netherlands Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch
    1795–1815 French annexation Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch · Geneanet
    1815–1830 United Kingdom of the Netherlands Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · WieWasWie / Open Archieven · FamilySearch
    1830–1914 Kingdom of Belgium Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch · Geneanet
    1914–1918 German occupation Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · Arolsen Archives
    1918–1940 Kingdom of Belgium Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch
    1940–1944 German occupation Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · Arolsen Archives
    1944–2026 Kingdom of Belgium Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch

    Do this: take the year you are looking for, find its row, and note the archive. That is the one to search — not the one the village is in today.

  2. The things that catch people out here

    1713–1795, Austrian Netherlands. The sovereign changes and the record-keeping does not: the parish goes on keeping the book. A researcher looking for an Austrian imperial series for these years is looking for something that was never created.

    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. The civil registers continue under occupation. The deportation and forced-labour records of these years are a separate series and largely elsewhere.

    1944–2026, Kingdom of Belgium. Registers pass to the State Archives once they are old enough to be public, so the open end of the series moves forward year by year; check the current threshold with the repository rather than assuming it. Statbel publishes surnames by commune, which this atlas carries and which nothing else here has at that grain.

  3. When you run out — and you will

    Everything above is what this atlas knows. It is not everything there is. Nine places in ten on this map have never been surveyed by anybody, so a gap here is usually our silence rather than the record's absence.

    Do this: write to the archive named in the era table for your year, even if we hold nothing for it. Then tell us what you found — a gap somebody has personally closed is the most useful thing a stranger can give this map.

The archives named above: Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch · Geneanet · WieWasWie / Open Archieven · Arolsen Archives. What each one holds and why.

How this place is on the map:

Whose archive this ground was

Tertre sits in Belgium and the Southern Netherlands. Which empire held it decides which archive holds its records — and for some of these years that is not the archive you would guess.

YearsWho held itWhose archive that means
1563–1713 Spanish Netherlands Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch

Parish registers begin after Trent and the good ones reach the sixteenth century. They are the ONLY record of a birth for the next two hundred years — there is no state register behind them.
1713–1795 Austrian Netherlands Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch

The sovereign changes and the record-keeping does not: the parish goes on keeping the book. A researcher looking for an Austrian imperial series for these years is looking for something that was never created.
1795–1815 French annexation Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch · Geneanet

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 Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · WieWasWie / Open Archieven · FamilySearch

Fifteen years under The Hague, and the civil registers run unbroken through them. Material of these years can sit on either side of a border that did not exist yet.
1830–1914 Kingdom of Belgium Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch · Geneanet

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 Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · Arolsen Archives

The civil registers continue under occupation. The deportation and forced-labour records of these years are a separate series and largely elsewhere.
1918–1940 Kingdom of Belgium Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch

Eupen-Malmedy passes from Germany to Belgium in 1920, so a family from that ground has German civil registration before it and Belgian after, and the paper did not all follow the border.
1940–1944 German occupation Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · Arolsen Archives

Arolsen holds the records of those deported from this ground.
1944–2026 Kingdom of Belgium Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État · FamilySearch

Registers pass to the State Archives once they are old enough to be public, so the open end of the series moves forward year by year; check the current threshold with the repository rather than assuming it. Statbel publishes surnames by commune, which this atlas carries and which nothing else here has at that grain.

No volumes recorded here yet.

The ground worth walking

Within 5 km — 11 places · 5 burial grounds. These neighbours hold 185 catalogued volumes between them.

A register belongs to a parish, not to a village. A hamlet with no church of its own was written into the book of the church it walked to — and that book is catalogued under the other place's name. This is the ground to search before concluding a record does not exist.

Neighbours with volumes catalogued
Also within 5 km, nothing catalogued

Hainaut

Correctly placed and unread. A gap here is this atlas's silence, not the record's — the registers may well exist and nobody has walked them.

Where the burials are

The other end of a parish: the register records the burial and the ground holds it, and a family that left no other trace very often left a stone. These are points on a map, not record collections — from Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, nobody here has visited one, and whether the burial register survives is a question for the parish or the municipality above. Grounds OpenStreetMap has not named are here too. They used to be left out, on the reasoning that a shape with no name is not a place anyone can ask about — which cost Senj its own graveyard, 2 km away and unnamed, while a named one 7 km off was all this page would show. Being unnamed is a fact about the map data, not about the ground. Only inside a mapped record region.

9 volumes catalogued here

The level below «a collection covers this place»: which book, for which years, and the link that opens its images. From FamilySearch's own catalogue. Nobody here has opened any of them. You can, though — mark the pages you have searched on any row below and this browser will remember where you stopped.

Other — 9

National sources for Belgium, unverified

From Wikidata, CC0 — the national archive and the national library where the country has one. Nobody here has opened these. The link answered when it was asked and that is the whole of what this map knows about them. They are listed because a country with no named source at all is the worse answer: 199 of the 237 countries here had nothing but the worldwide services, which cover everywhere and therefore say nothing about anywhere.

The sources for Belgium

National and regional sources that cover this ground whether or not anybody has walked it here — which makes them the answer, not the consolation, for a place with no volumes recorded on it.

  • Rijksarchief / Archives de l'État Images, free, account needed Brussels, Belgium
    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.
  • Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
    Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
  • Open Archieven An index only — no images
    The open index behind more than two hundred Dutch and Belgian archives — civil registration, population registers, church books and memorial cards, pooled and searchable by name, with an open API. It tells you the entry exists and which shelf it is on; the scan, where there is one, is the holding archive's to show. Distinct from WieWasWie, which is the official portal over much of the same material.

Sources that cover everywhere

Not about Belgium in particular — these reach most of the world, which includes here. They are listed after the local sources because a body that holds this ground's own paper is a better first stop than one that holds a little of everywhere's. Worth knowing they exist all the same.

  • OldNews.com Nobody has walked this one yet
    Digitised historical newspapers, indexed by town. The CATALOGUE is harvested and published here — 38,151 papers in 6,450 towns across 75 countries, of which 5,968 towns join to a point on this map — because their robots.txt says Allow: /en/newspapers/* and the whole structure is in the URL. WHAT IT COSTS IS NOT KNOWN, and that is why this says unsurveyed rather than free or paid: the same robots.txt disallows /*/record and /*/search, so the pages that would answer it are the pages not to read. There is a log-in; whether an image is free behind it has not been established, and a colour on the map is a promise this cannot keep yet.
  • Internet Archive Images, free, no account
    Full-text search across millions of digitised books, including parish histories, nobiliaries and local monographs that name ordinary people. THREE THINGS VERIFIED 2026-10-11 WHILE REBUILDING A FAMILY'S 18th-CENTURY LINE FROM IT. (1) SEARCH THE RAREST TOKEN, NOT THE SURNAME. A search on one unusual middle name returned 329 hits and pulled out a 1972 family memoir, a reference work of colonial governors, a Falklands bibliography, an 1866 genealogical query and two monthly Army Lists — none of which a surname search had ever surfaced, because the book was CATALOGUED UNDER A MANGLED FORM OF THE SURNAME. (2) THE FULL-TEXT SEARCH HAS A PLAIN JSON API, which the site's own search page calls and which returns highlighted snippets: /services/search/beta/page_production/?service_backend=fts&user_query=%22PHRASE%22&hits_per_page=100&page=1&aggregations=false. It needs an ordinary browser User-Agent AND an Accept header; without the Accept header the site answers some requests with a flat 404. (3) FOR ANY OUT-OF-COPYRIGHT ITEM THE WHOLE TEXT IS ONE FILE — archive.org/download/<identifier>/<identifier>_djvu.txt — so a whole volume can be searched locally rather than page by page. Four Army Lists of 1775-1783, about 400KB of text each, were downloaded and searched entire in under a minute; that is how an absence can be MEASURED, by counting what the volume does contain. IN-COPYRIGHT ITEMS ARE LENDING-RESTRICTED: the item page still shows the metadata and the LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS without borrowing, which was enough to recover a woman's missing middle name, but search-inside and the text need an account.
  • Arolsen Archives Images, free, no account
    The former International Tracing Service. Concentration camp, forced labour and displaced-persons records for some seventeen and a half million people, free and fully indexed.
  • Find a Grave Images, free, no account
    Volunteer-photographed headstones and cemetery indexes, worldwide, with very uneven coverage. Owned by Ancestry but free to read.
  • WikiTree Images, free, no account
    A free, single shared tree with an unusually strong sourcing culture. Not a record source.
  • Yad Vashem — Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names Images, free, no account
    Names and testimony pages for victims of the Shoah, free, no account. THE SEARCH IS FULLY URL-DRIVEN even though the site is an Angular app: /en/names/search-results-names?page=N&gn_last_name=X&gnt_last_name=yvSynonym&gn_first_name=Y&gnt_first_name=yvSynonym, with gnt_ taking yvSynonym, literal or soundex. THE RESULTS COME IN THREE TABS AND THE SECOND IS THE ONE ALMOST NOBODY USES: “Results Regarding Victims”, “RESULTS REGARDING DATA SUBMITTERS” (append #submitter to the URL) and “Additional Results”. The submitter tab lists every record whose SUBMITTER matched the name searched — so SEARCHING A SURVIVOR'S NAME THERE RETURNS THE DEAD HE WROTE DOWN, and one Page of Testimony can be turned into a whole family in a single query. There are also Submitter Last Name and Submitter First Name fields in the advanced form for the same purpose. TWO THINGS MEASURED IN USE. (1) THE SYNONYM EXPANSION IS LOOSE and will fold in a different submitter of a similar name from another country — in one test, 24 of 29 results belonged to somebody else and had to be separated by place — so a submitter set must be READ and not counted. (2) A PAGE OF TESTIMONY IS A RELATIONSHIP DOCUMENT, NOT A DATE DOCUMENT. Written from memory, often decades later and often in Hebrew and auto-translated back, it is the best evidence there is for who was whose son and the worst for when: in one family read here a Page disagreed with the German federal memorial list on a birth day AND a death year (the lists were right both times), two Pages by the same man for the same victim gave two different places of death, and the same parents appeared under German forenames on one form and Hebrew ones on the other — which is itself a gift, because it hands you the Hebrew names a community register would use. What a Page gives that no list gives is the single word in the “relationship to victim” field: son, nephew, grandson.
  • FamilySearch Images, free, account needed
    The largest free collection of record images and indexes in the world. A free account is required, and a minority of images are restricted to Family History Centres and affiliate libraries. TWO TRAPS IN THE CROATIAN HOLDINGS, both verified by use on 2026-10-09 and both capable of producing a confident false nil. (1) THE SAME PARISH SITS IN MORE THAN ONE COLLECTION. Bakar (Buccari) records are indexed under BOTH 'Croatia, Church Books, 1516-1994' (cc=2040054) AND 'Croatia, Delnice Deanery Catholic Church Books, 1571-1926'. A search restricted to 2040054 returns ZERO for records that demonstrably exist in the Delnice Deanery set - a marriage of 1783 at Bakar was found only once the collection filter was dropped. So a nil reported against one Croatian collection is a statement about that collection, never about the parish; and the catalogue's film list for a place may be split across collections that do not cross-reference each other. (2) SEARCH URL PARAMETERS SILENTLY FAIL. Hand-built query strings of the form /search/record/results?q.surname=X&q.anyPlace=Y returned 'Historical Record Search Results (0)' for a record whose own detail page gives exactly that surname and exactly that place string. The same query typed into the search form returns it. Place and collection parameters are the ones observed to fail; a bare q.surname + q.givenName pair did work. THE PRACTICAL RULE: never report a FamilySearch nil from a URL you assembled. Drive the form, and run a known-positive control - an ark id you already hold - through the same path first. An index entry is also a pointer and not a reading: the 1783 marriage above is indexed as two names and a date, and the words 'ex Gollogorizza' in the entry itself - the words that place the groom 130 km away in another crown land and make the record foreign to the Bakar set it sits in - appear nowhere in the index. Open the image before building or dismissing a household on an indexed record. Film and image-group identifiers DO work as stable handles where this collection's viewer carries no wc= waypoint: the Bakar marriage volume is film 005494714, 'Bakar. Religious Marriage Registers 1739-1808', item 1, 226 images, image group M99F-VRM. FULL-RESOLUTION IMAGES CAN BE DOWNLOADED, and it is worth knowing because the viewer's own zoom is a poor substitute for cropping locally. The download control in the image viewer opens a dialog offering 'PDF Record Image with Highlights', 'PDF with No Highlights', 'JPG Only' and 'No Record Image'. Choose JPG Only: it delivers the plate at native scan resolution - a Croatian parish register leaf came down at 5975x4206 - named <filmnumber>_<imagenumber>.jpeg, e.g. 005494714_00172.jpeg, which is a self-describing filename worth keeping. Note that the DeepZoom tiles the viewer itself loads (service/records/storage/deepzoomcloud/dz/v1/apid:<APID>/image_files/<level>/<col>_<row>.jpg) return 401 to an unauthenticated fetch and are blocked by CORS from the www origin, so scraping them is neither possible nor necessary; the download button is the supported route and it works. Resolution matters for more than comfort: a contested initial letter in a surname was settled only by cropping two words at identical magnification from the downloaded file, and the same comparison attempted through the viewer's zoom had been inconclusive.
  • Geni Images, free, account needed
    One shared world tree. Useful for finding other researchers on the same line; not a record source, and its assertions are only as good as their citations.
  • JewishGen Images, free, account needed
    The central Jewish genealogy resource — town-level KehilaLinks, burial and Holocaust databases, and revision lists for eastern Europe.
  • BillionGraves Partly free, partly paid
    GPS-tagged headstone photographs. Smaller than Find a Grave but its coordinates are per-stone, which Find a Grave's often are not. FREE AND PAID ARE SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE, surveyed 7 October 2026 at a South African cemetery: the search, the transcription — name with full birth and death dates — and the per-stone GPS coordinates are free and need no account, and so is a 180x135 thumbnail of the stone. THE FULL-RESOLUTION PHOTOGRAPH IS NOT: it requires an account and a subscription. The thumbnail is far too small to read an inscription, so a transcription taken from here CANNOT BE CHECKED AGAINST THE STONE without paying — which matters, because a volunteer's reading of a weathered date is exactly the thing an archive will want to verify. AND ITS SEARCH URL SILENTLY IGNORES WHAT YOU ASK IT, which makes it USABLE FOR A POSITIVE AND USELESS FOR A NEGATIVE: a hit here is a hit, and no absence may be quoted from it. Verified 9 October: `cemetery_country=United+Kingdom` is accepted and disregarded — the results still carry United States and Australian stones — and `page` does nothing at all, `page=7` returning the identical six records as `page=1` under a footer reading «Page 1 of 178». The footer asserts a depth the URL cannot reach, so the first page is not the result set and nothing that looks like «no match in that country» is one.
  • Geneanet Partly free, partly paid
    Member-contributed trees and transcriptions, strongest in France. Much is free; a Premium tier gates some search and images.
  • Ancestry Images, behind a paywall
    The largest commercial collection. Strong on the English-speaking world, censuses and immigration; weak on continental parish registers.
  • MyHeritage Images, behind a paywall
    Commercial, with a large tree network and good European newspaper and directory coverage. Search is free; opening a record is not. A LINK CHECKER CANNOT TELL YOU WHETHER A MYHERITAGE CITATION IS ALIVE, measured 2026-10-09 against 428 of them carried into a family archive from a GEDCOM export. Record pages answer an unauthenticated request in one of two ways, and NEITHER IS AN HONEST 200: either a 302 to a door, or HTTP 200 WITH AN 843-BYTE BODY READING «Request unsuccessful. Incapsula incident ID: …». A checker that reads the status code alone therefore reports every one of them as RESOLVING. Any archive auditing its outward citations has to read the body, and should grade these neither alive nor dead.

FamilySearch collections that reach here

A collection is a claim over an area, not a book standing in this town — so these are ranked by how specifically they reach Tertre. A free account is needed to open the images, and some are restricted to a Family History Centre.

Elsewhere in the same country — 36

Narrower than the country but catalogued under some other district. Listed because a collection's title is not always where its records end, and never because it covers this ground.

…and 11 more.

The whole country — 23

Worth searching, and worth knowing it is a national index rather than a local one.

See who held Tertre between 1800 and 1920 →
The jurisdiction answer — which empire held this ground, and therefore whose archive — could only be got at from the map until now. This opens it there, on 1863; drag the year from any point between 1563 and 2026.

See Tertre on the map →

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