Starting a family tree in Belgium: where to find the records

In the drawer of your grandmother's cupboard lies a small stack of memorial cards, with an elastic band around them. On each card a name, a date of birth, a village. Without your knowing it, that is the beginning of a family tree. This article tells you where to look next, and what of it is free online in Belgium.

The short answer

Start with what you have at home and with the people still living. Then search AGATHA, the online search portal of the State Archives of Belgium (Rijksarchief): it has free scans of civil registration from 1796 to about 1920 and of the parish registers before that. Death records are public after 50 years, marriage records after 75, birth records after 100. Younger records are requested from the municipality, as direct-line family.

Step 1: start at home

The best sources are often in the house. Look for memorial cards (bidprentjes) and funeral notices, the family record book, old identity cards, letters and photos with something written on the back. And ask the people who still remember. For each person, note what you know for certain: full name, date and place of birth, marriage, death. Also write down where you found it. A family tree without sources cannot be checked later.

Step 2: the State Archives, through AGATHA

Since June 2024, you search the State Archives through AGATHA (agatha.arch.be). Old links to the former search pages no longer work. There are two entry points you need as a beginner:

• Genealogical sources: scans of more than 28,000 parish registers (up to 1796) and more than 36,000 civil registration registers (1796 to about 1920), with the ten-year indexes. You browse by municipality, as in the real register. To view the scans you create a free account. You can download up to 100 pages a day.
• Record abstracts (Analyses van akten): a name index of about 42 million names, compiled by volunteers. Here you can search by name, even without an account. Not all registers have been processed yet, so if you cannot find someone, browse the scans yourself.

A tip for browsing: start with the ten-year indexes. They list all the births, marriages and deaths in a municipality for each ten-year period, in alphabetical order, with the date. That lets you find the right record quickly.

Step 3: before 1796, the parish registers

Civil registration begins in 1796, under French rule. Before that, the parish priest recorded baptisms, marriages and burials in the parish registers. In practice these have usually survived from the early seventeenth century, sometimes earlier. Expect Latin: Joannes for Jan, Maria for Marie, and word endings that change with their place in the sentence.

Which records are public

Record	Public after
Death record	50 years
Marriage record	75 years
Birth record	100 years

That is how the Belgian Civil Code (Burgerlijk Wetboek) has set it out since 1 April 2019. Anyone may consult or request a public record. If a record is not yet public, only the person themselves, the partner, direct-line family (parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren), the heirs and their notary or lawyer receive a copy. You request it from the civil registration office of the municipality where the record was drawn up. For genealogical research into records that are not yet public, a separate application procedure has existed since 2021.

Other sources that yield a lot

• Population registers (from 1847): who lived in each household, with occupation and moves. They are open to consult after 120 years, usually at the city or municipal archive or the State Archives. Antwerp has put its public registers online for free through FelixArchief.
• Militia registers: with parents, occupation and even a physical description. Those of West Flanders (1813 to 1922) can be consulted fully in digital form.
• Memorial cards (bidprentjes): common in Flanders from around 1820. Online on Karakol, Archiefbank Vlaanderen and Geneanet, among others. Familiekunde Vlaanderen keeps about 850,000 of them in its documentation centre.
• FamilySearch: free with an account, with Belgian indexes of baptisms, marriages and deaths, and civil registration by province.

Help and software

Familiekunde Vlaanderen (until 2011 the Vlaamse Vereniging voor Familiekunde) has regional branches with reading rooms, courses and volunteers who are glad to help, and publishes the journal Vlaamse Stam. Geneanet lets you build a family tree for free and look at other people's trees.

Gentools.be has gathered practical tools for genealogists for years, from calendar conversion to software: gentools.be (in Dutch).

To keep your family tree, Aldfaer and Gramps are free. Both export to GEDCOM, the exchange format of family tree programs, as do Legacy, MyHeritage and Geneanet. If you have received or made such a file, thememorypalace.ai/gedcom shows you, for free and without an account, how many generations it contains, who the oldest ancestor is and where the gaps are. The file never leaves your device.

From records to people

A record tells you when someone was born, not who they were. That lives in the photos, in the stories, in the memorial card someone kept. In The Memory Palace, the family tree comes in as GEDCOM and every generation gets a place beside its photos and stories, so the names become people again.