Archives Portal Europe allows users to search across archival collections throughout Europe or to specifically locate an archive within a European country. It’s a helpful site for genealogists and family historians looking to find archival records or an archive’s website.
Archives Portal Europe is part of a cooperative effort with Europeana to make archival material searchable. “We are an important strategic partner of Europeana and are working with them to develop a common digital infrastructure for cultural heritage across Europe.”
Archives Portal Europe is “working to create a one-stop web service to make European archives as accessible as possible. …Archives Portal Europe enables them [users] to find information more efficiently from millions of archival materials stored in hundreds of archival institutions. This is the first time European archives have collaborated on this scale, and the potential that these connections provide is enormous for both archival professionals and the users.”
There are many ways to search at Archives Portal Europe.
-
You can select the Search tab and use the filters to limit your query.
-
You can select the Directory tab and search by a geographical map or directory listing (this is the search method I use the most).
-
When you select the Directory tab, you’ll see the European countries listed beneath the map and you can select a country and the menu will expand and show you locations within the country which you can further expand until you find a listing of archives at that location.
-
In the image below I used the map to select Austria, then I’ll use the directory listing to find an archive within Austria (because I’m less familiar with the geography of Austria, so an alphabetical listing is more helpful to me at this point).
-
Here, I’ve selected the archive I’m looking for and Archives Portal Europe gives me contact information for that particular archive, including a link to the archive’s website. This is the feature I use the most at Archives Portal Europe.
-
You can look at Featured Documents from each country at Archives Portal Europe, to get an idea what some favorite holdings include.
-
You can Search Archives Portal Europe by Topics, such as Church records and registers or Genealogy. Currently, Archives Portal Europe primarily has church and genealogy records from France, Latvia, and Poland.
