Family research

The holdings of the Aachen City Archive include the civil and personal status registers of the City of Aachen and the registry offices of the formerly independent municipalities of Burtscheid, Forst, Brand, Eilendorf, Haaren, Kornelimünster, Walheim, Laurensberg and Richterich in accordance with the statutory retention period (i.e. birth certificates older than 110 years, marriage certificates older than 80 years and death certificates older than 30 years). All more recent certificates are still held by the Aachen registry office.

If you would like information or a scan from the civil status registers, please contact the Stadtarchiv Aachen in writing by letter or email(stadtarchiv@mail.aachen.de) or order the documents from the reading room advisory service on site. The processing of your request is subject to a fee in accordance with the Aachen City Archive fee schedule. The more precise the information you provide, the easier and cheaper it will be for us to process your request. Please note that processing may take several weeks depending on the volume of requests.

For conservation reasons, it is not possible to show the civil registers in the reading room. However, there are decennial tables for the civil registers for the period 1798-1872, which can be viewed in the reading room of the municipal archive.

Please note: It is not possible to issue international certificates or Hague Postilles. Please contact the relevant departments for this.

The Aachen City Archive holds a number of Catholic and Protestant church registers from Aachen and the surrounding communities, most of which have lists of names. These can also be viewed in the reading room. More recent church records can generally be found at the Catholic Diocesan Archive in Aachen or the Archive of the Protestant Church in the Rhineland.

Digitized sources

In cooperation with the University and State Library (ULB) Bonn, the Aachen City Archive has digitized its address book collection (1838-1991). It is available to you free of charge via the pages of the ULB Bonn. If you are just starting out with family research or are looking for comprehensive information on family research in the Aachen City Archive, you can download the handout "Family research in the Aachen City Archive. Sources and possibilities for genealogists" in the reading room of the City Archive. The handout costs 3 euros (20 pages, in color, A5 format). We also recommend the online resource for family research in the Aachen area, Familienbuch Euregio.