The State Archive in Lublin

The State Archive in Lublin (henceforward SAL) was established in the present form in 1918. Already the Archive's beginnings continue the archival traditions of Lublin, which go back to the 16th century, when offices and courts kept systematic archives, where were held documents and municipal registers, sąd grodzki [castle court, iudicium castrensis] records and registers of Crown Tribunal sessions in Lublin, Lublin's sąd ziemski [nobles' district court] registers and chamberlain records. In 1827 the Lublin Archives of Historical Records were established, which kept the registers of the Crown Tribunal in Lublin, as well as registers and records of all types of courts and nobles' offices of the Lublin voivodship, the Chełm district and Krasnostaw powiat [county] (Ruskie voivodship), and from Grabowiec and Horodło districts (Bełz voivodship), and the registers and charters of towns in these areas - a total of five thousand registers. In 1887, the Lublin Archives of Historical Records were closed down by the order of the Kingdom of Poland's Russian authorities, which decided that the Archive resources relate to the "Russian lands" and as a result the archives were transferred to Vilna (Vilnius). The guberniya town, Lublin, was thus deprived of both its historical records and the Archives. In June 1918 the so-called local archive was established in Lublin, which stored 19th -century records: those of Russian guberniya and powiat administrative, military, peasant and revenue-service offices and gendarmerie of the guberniyas of Lublin, Chełm and partly Siedlce. On the basis of its resources, the State Archive was established in Lublin by the decree of the Regency Council on 31 July 1918. It was one of the first State Archives established in Poland after it regained its independence. The Archive started operating on 1 January 1918, when Prof. Stanisław Ptaszycki, appointed its director, arrived from Petersburg. The most important achievement at that time was regaining of the Old-Polish collection returned by Soviet Russia under the Treaty of Riga in 1922. After Lublin was liberated from the German occupation, the SAL started its official operation on 27 July 1944. The SAL employees faced the urgent problem of securing materials created by the German administration, which the hastily fleeing Germans failed to destroy. The archivists managed to secure and incorporate in the resources the records of the Majdanek concentration camp administration, the Lublin Castle prison, and those of the Gestapo, German gendarmerie and the Lublin District governor. Under the new political system after the war, the Archive's organization, st ucture and resources underwent considerable changes. Its was renamed the Voivodship State Archive in Lublin and subordinate powiat archives were established in Chełm, Łuków, Zamość and Kraśnik, which collected mainly post-war archival materials according to their territorial jurisdiction. The resources considerably grew in size with the incorporation of the town archives of Lublin, independent until 1950, and after taking over the archives of private industrial plants and landed estates, including the Zamojski entail, that were liquidated as a result of political-economic reforms. The most valuable acquisitions, however, were the 16-th century ziemski court records, castle [grodzki] court records, and town registers, which could not be regained from Soviet Russia after the WW1 - they returned to the SAL in 1962. New legal provisions ensured a constant influx of records from various offices and institutions to the Archive but they also obligated the archivists to mould the future resources by systematic supervision over record repositories (company archives) and training of employees on the proper organization of office work, especially the introduction of increasingly widespread uniform record filing methods. In 1965 the SAL was transferred to the new seat located within Lublin's Old Town, in the historic building of the former Jesuit college restored after war damage. In the 1970s the SAL witnessed further important changes in its structure and organization. The administrative reform of 1975 transformed the Powiat Archive in Zamość, previously the SAL's local branch, into an independent voivodship-level archive, while the powiat archives in Chełm, Kraśnik and Radzyń Podlaski (transferred from Łuków) became field branches (now outer branches) of the SAL. The consequence of this reform was the need to hand over part of the resources to the newly established Voivodship State Archive in Siedlce. In 1983 the former name of State Archive in Lublin was restored. The introduction of the new administrative division of Poland in 1999 did not produce any changes in the SAL's structure and the scope of territorial competence. Today the Archive operates on the greater part of the Lublin voivodship and a small area (Łosice powiat) of the Mazowieckie voivodship. The political, systemic, economic and social transformations that occurred after 1989 resulted again in a considerable increase in the SAL's resources. In 1990 the archival records of the Polish United Workers' Party and youth organizations were taken over. Source: www.lublin.ap.gov.pl