The Aachen City Archive contains the civil and personal status registers of the City of Aachen and the registry offices of the formerly independent municipalities in accordance with the statutory retention period: 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 at the Aachen registry office. For conservation reasons, you cannot view the registry office documents in the Aachen City Archive yourself. For the period from 1802/03-1872, copies of the decennial tables are available in the reading room. For the period after that, employees of the city archives have been compiling alphabetical lists of names for the registers of the registry office documents for several years, which can also be used in the reading room. A current list can be downloaded as a pdf file at the bottom of this page.
If you would like information or a scan from the civil status registers, please contact the archive in writing (by letter or email)(stadtarchiv@mail.aachen.de) or order the documents from the reading room advisory service. The processing of your request is subject to a fee in accordance with the Aachen City Archives fee schedule. Therefore, please provide as much information as possible about the persons you are looking for in your request, as this will make our search easier and save you money. Please note that processing may take several weeks depending on the volume of inquiries!
The Aachen City Archive holds a number of Catholic and Protestant church registers from Aachen and the surrounding parishes. The originals are blocked for conservation reasons. However, copies are freely available to users in the reading room. There are also some copies of books, the originals of which are stored elsewhere. There are alphabetical lists of names for some of the church registers, which make it easier to find individual persons. A list can be found at the bottom of this page as a pdf download. More recent church records can usually be found at the Catholic Diocesan Archives in Aachen (http://archiv.kibac.de/) or at the archives of the Protestant Church in the Rhineland.
If you are just starting out with family research or are looking for comprehensive information on family research in the Stadtarchiv Aachen, you can purchase the handout "Family research in the Stadtarchiv Aachen. Sources and possibilities for genealogists" during the opening hours of the reading room (Tues., 1-5 pm, Wed., 9 am-5 pm, Thurs., 9 am-1 pm) in the reading room of the City Archive. The handout costs 3 euros (20 pages, color, A5 format).
Digitized sources from the Aachen City Archive
The Stadtarchiv Aachen has digitized its address book collection in cooperation with the University and State Library (ULB) Bonn. It is available to you free of charge via the pages of the ULB Bonn!