Budapest City Archives: Our History on the Internet

“They can keep track of what I phoned about / and when, why, to whom. / They write into files what I dreamed of / and also who will understand it” – Attila József lamented in his great poem Air! (Levegőt!). Indeed, there is only a single point of view from which the public image of bureaucracy is unequivocally positive: as a historical source. As the decades pass, the value of every recorded piece of data grows. After centuries, perhaps nothing else will preserve the memory of a person who once lived apart from the records of the tax authority.

Our history and our personal stories alike lie in documents produced by the authorities. “Our heart, while it ripens longing, / is no card-index datum.” We really do not learn much about longings by browsing archival material, but we obtain valuable data for practically any historical research. Changes affecting the whole of society can be reconstructed, but so can the history of a single family or city block.

Archives store and manage enormous quantities of records. Beyond the legal regulation, the proper storage, accessibility and searchability of the holdings are the key to meaningful research on such masses of documents. And there is only one way to manage huge data sets effectively: digitisation, part of which is that texts must be made searchable and images must be given descriptive metadata.

The Budapest City Archives can claim fantastic achievements in this field. It is a leader in the digitisation, processing and publication of the material it manages. Over recent years it has created separate collections on the most varied topics. Each of these separate groups of documents makes accessible a well-defined group of sources. They cover a period of manageable length and are mostly also tied to a particular place, which makes them ideal tools for uncovering local history. They are an inexhaustible source not only for researchers but for everyone interested in the history of their own family or place of residence.

We present a few of the Archives' collections. It is worth getting to know these treasure troves, and also how many different approaches there are by which digitised material can be arranged.

Data return forms of 1944 covering the entire population of Budapest

A document collection with a sad occasion, whose discovery nevertheless brought joy, since it offers insight into a troubled period of our history and also helps to reconstruct the lives of families whose stories were violently cut short. But it is also significant for the population of Budapest as a whole. In June 1944 the population of Budapest classed as Jewish was moved into houses marked with a star. In preparation for this, at the beginning of June, all the flats and tenants in Budapest were registered. The data were supplied by house owners and caretakers, who, besides the housing conditions and the names of the main tenants, also stated whether the person was of Jewish or non-Jewish origin. That is, a complete list of the population and flats of Budapest was compiled. Until September 2015 it seemed that the complete documentation had been destroyed during the siege of the city. But during a flat renovation the year before last, when a wall was knocked through, about 7,000 hidden pages of the data return forms came to light. The collection contains these, in processed form.

Available at: https://hungaricana.hu/hu/adatbazisok/leveltari-iratgyujtemeny/lakas-adatszolgaltatasi-ivek-adatbazisa/

Land register folios from Budapest after the Compromise

Land register entries have outstanding informational value from the point of view of architectural history and local history, and may even have evidential force from a legal point of view. On georeferenced maps we can search for the plot we are interested in and then, by clicking on it, view the folios that belonged to the given lot number. Land register folios are the predecessors of today's property sheets. Currently the Óbuda folios kept from the 1870s to 1921, and about a third of the folios of the Pest side, can be viewed in the database. Placing them on the map gave the mass of documents enormous informational value. The map can be searched by present-day address and lot number, and also by browsing the georeferenced contemporary map.

Available at: https://hungaricana.hu/hu/adatbazisok/leveltari-iratgyujtemeny/telekkonyvi-betetek-adatbazisa/

Images of the Urban Planning and Architecture Department of the Capital Council (1960s)

In the late 1950s and the '60s, comprehensive action plans were drawn up for restoring order to the townscape of Budapest's main thoroughfares, backed by substantial photographic documentation. In the digital copies of the 2,737 photographs taken at that time in total, we can marvel at the townscape of 1960s Budapest, its shops, advertising signs, cheap eateries, espresso bars, services and, of course, the passers-by caught on camera.

Available at: https://gallery.hungaricana.hu/hu/BFLPhoto/

Plans with a Hungarian connection held in the Slovak Technical Museum (Košice)

Only legends used to circulate about the architectural plans and photographs relating to Hungary kept at the Slovak Technical Museum (Slovenské technické múzeum) in Košice. No direct evidence is available about the circumstances of how they got there, but it can be assumed that they may once have been part of the material that the Hungarian National Technical Museum (Országos Magyar Műszaki Múzeum), established in 1935, moved to Košice in 1939. The Budapest City Archives was able to survey and fully digitise the material with the support of the Ithaka programme of the National Cultural Fund of Hungary. An outstandingly important part of the architectural plan material is some 30 plans by Imre Steindl, the designer of the Hungarian Parliament Building, among which there are designs for churches, castles, residential buildings and public buildings alike. Of our most renowned architects, works by Alajos Hauszmann, Ödön Lechner and Samu Pecz are also represented in it. A compact and beautiful part of the plan collection is made up of the competition entries, submitted under mottos, for the design competition for the building of the Pest Hungarian Commercial Bank (Pesti Magyar Kereskedelmi Bank). Records of higher technical education and vocational training are numerous.

Available at: https://maps.hungaricana.hu/hu/, HU BFL XV.17.i.1 Digital copies of the documents with a Hungarian connection held in the Slovak Technical Museum

Prisoner registers

The database makes searchable the data of arrestees and convicts admitted to the Budapest court prisons between 1873 and 1923, of convicts taken into the Budapest Central Prison (Budapesti Országos Gyűjtőfogház) between 1896 and 1950, and of inmates who passed through the same prison between 1896 and 1908. In parallel with data entry, the registers are being digitised, so more and more can be researched directly on the internet. With a view to the protection of personal data, the data of persons for whom 90 years have not yet passed since birth are restricted. This collection fills a gap, among other reasons, because the documentation of Budapest criminal cases from the Dualist period has not survived. But it can also be interesting from a family-history point of view, although one might not necessarily want to start tracing a family tree precisely here.

Available at: https://hungaricana.hu/hu/adatbazisok/leveltari-iratgyujtemeny/budapest-fovaros-leveltara-fogolytorzskonyvek-es-nyilvantartasok/

Minutes of the governing bodies of the councils (1950-1989)

For anyone dealing with the history of the state-socialist period, the documentation of the work of the local governing bodies is an indispensable source. The minutes of the capital's governing bodies are important not only for the history of Budapest; we can also follow the course of national events in them. Because of the peculiarities of how the party-state functioned, both party bodies (1948-1956: Hungarian Working People's Party, 1956-1989: Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party) and council bodies at the capital and district level are equally important. A basic aid to the research is the compilation of the lists of names and service data of the officials appearing in the minutes, which is at the same time also a basic source for getting to know the leading stratum of the era.

Available at: https://archives.hungaricana.hu/hu/archontologia/

Topotheques

In Hungary, the Topotheque online platform, which has operated with great success in Austria for years, was able to take root with the support of the EU-funded international project Community as Opportunity – The Creative Archives' and Users' Network (CO:OP). It not only provides access to privately held sources relating to the past and present of a given community (photographs, audio and visual materials, documents etc.) but also preserves them for posterity in a professional, systematic way. The project builds unique, virtual “data bouquets” around a town, a district or even just a block of flats, by involving the work of individuals interested in the community and in history. At present the multimedia databases of Berettyóújfalu, the Városliget and Budafok are publicly available.

Available at: http://www.topotheque.eu/

Holocaust memorial site

With this site the Archives serves expressly educational and attitude-shaping purposes. The collection was put together on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the deportations in Hungary, in order to show, by making selected individual and family stories public, the personal experiences of deprivation of rights, persecution, mourning and survival.

Available at: http://holocaust.archivportal.hu

Béla Lajta Virtual Archive

This archive is a good example of inter-institutional cooperation. The architect Béla Lajta (1873-1920), who was active at the beginning of the last century (we owe to him, for example, the Institute for the Blind and the building of the Miklós Radnóti Secondary School), left behind an extremely exciting oeuvre. The architect's personal legacy was largely destroyed, and only a small number of plans, photographs, artefacts or manuscripts found their way into public or private collections. The “Béla Lajta Virtual Archive” aims to gather, with the help of the World Wide Web, the traceable objects and pictorial and written documents of this scattered legacy, this fragmentarily surviving oeuvre, and to present them in a clearly arranged, searchable system.

Available at: http://lajtaarchiv.hu