The story of Archiefbank Brugge began in 2013 with the online provision of the civil registry records and subsequently of several series of population registers, with dates linked to each. You therefore no longer have to go to our reading room for these archive documents. You can look it all up from home, consult it, print it out or keep it in your own digital file, all free of charge. You only need to register if you want to create a digital file of your search results. This will only take a few seconds and is completely free.

Our virtual reading room has expanded by more than 300,000 images as of 30 March 2018. This growth means more than doubling the supply. It concerns the Bruges parish registry and a great many series from the Old Archives of the city of Bruges (including Hallegeboden [historically, official announcements of regulations], Books of Resolution, Zestendelen registers [historically, a type of land registry] and Clerks of the Vierschaar [historically, a form of judicial tribunal in the Low Countries]), as well as the population registers for all the sub-municipalities.

An important note, however, is that no data has yet been linked to these images. So when you enter a query, you will only get results from the series to which data is linked (see below). But a great many of these new series contain an index of their own (e.g. the parish registers or the population registers) and can therefore be easily consulted via the tree structure (left margin). In the meantime, volunteers continue working to add metadata to the new images. 

The following series have dates attached to them and can be searched:

- The civil registry records for Bruges and its sub-municipalities (1795-1920 for births, 1795-1945 for marriages and 1795-1970 for deaths).

- The population registers for Bruges (1790-1812, 1809-1830, 1830-1846, 1846-1866 and 1866-1880) and sub-municipalities (partial)

- First World War posters

- Burghers' books (Old Archives, series 130: years 1418-1498 and series 131: 1548-1788)

- Obituaries

If there is no metadata for a series, this is indicated in the tree structure on the left of the database.

Please note! When consulting our Archive Bank with Internet Explorer version 11, you may encounter some difficulties in clicking through to another image using the arrows or the tree structure. We recommend that you download a higher version or consult our Archive Bank using Google Chrome or Firefox.