Further archives

As a rule of thumb, the former responsibility determines which current archive holds the records you are looking for. Therefore, first consider which authorities and actors were involved with your topic in the past.

For example:

You are interested in a particular project that was promoted by the Aachen regional president around 1900. Because the regional councils were and still are state authorities, the state archives are responsible, specifically the Rhineland department in Duisburg. You now find out that the regional president realized his project together with a Catholic institution in Aachen. To find out more about this, you should contact the diocesan archives, but because Aachen did not have its own diocese around 1900, but belonged to the diocese of Cologne, you should contact the diocesan archives in Cologne. However, we would also recommend contacting our city archives, because larger projects of the district president usually required coordination with municipal administrative offices, for whose records we are responsible.

Important archives

Due to Aachen's proximity to the border, research in Belgian and Dutch archives can be promising:

After the two world wars, Aachen was under Allied occupation, namely by Belgium and France after the First World War and by the USA, Great Britain and Belgium after the Second World War. The relevant records can be found in Belgian, French, British and US archives.

Sometimes documents cannot be found in the archive where you would expect to find them, so it is advisable to contact the city archive as a precaution: stadtarchiv@mail.aachen.de