Archivportal-D: How do you find the right archive?

Would you like to find out something about the post-war years in the town where you live? The first place to go is the municipal archive. Such archives store the documents of a municipality, town or district. You can easily find out whether there is a municipal archive in your town or city on the Archivportal-D. Over 2,600 archives can be found there.

To do this, either click on the federal state in which you live on the homepage or select it from the ‘Selection by federal state’ drop-down menu. Tick ‘Municipal archives’ in the ‘Selection by category’ list. Then click on ‘Find archives’. This will take you to a page with a list of hits. You will automatically switch to the ‘Find archives’ tab.

Tip: If the search results page - as in our example - contains a large number of hits, press Ctrl + f. This will open a search slot on the page where you can enter the name of your home town. Then you don't have to look through the entire alphabetically sorted list.

And if you can't find an archive for your town or city, don't give up! Because some places don't have their own archive. Then think about which district you live in and search for the name of the district or the next largest town.

Once you have found what you are looking for, simply click on the name of the archive. This will take you to the so-called institution page. This is the page of the archive in Archivportal-D. There you will find information about the location and website of the archive, sometimes also a description of the archive and the documents stored there. You can contact the team on site directly with your questions.

If the archive already provides information on Archivportal-D, you can also start searching directly. Click on ‘Show archive material’ on the right to see all the archive's data.

If you don't want to look at all the content but want to search for something in particular, you can use the directory. This is also called archive tectonics. It describes the organisation of the documents in an archive, similar to a table of contents in a book. You can find it by clicking on the ‘Archive tectonics’ tab on the institution page.

More tips on searching the archive portal

How do you find sources on the topic of the post-war period?

What could your search in the Archive Portal-D look like?