Belgium possesses several unique sets of records with valuable information for genealogists. Tens of thousands of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe moved to and through Belgium starting at the end of the 19th century and continuing up to World War II. Records exist on nearly all of them. Even if a relative lived in Belgium for such a short while that no vital records, such as birth certificates or marriage licenses, would have been generated, archival documents likely exist that include genealogical information on the relative and his or her parents (including birth dates and birth towns).

If, for example, relatives immigrated to the United States from Antwerp, valuable documents may be available to open new directions in genealogical research. The Belgian port of Antwerp was the port of embarkation for many Jews from Eastern Europe who made their way to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. As the United States imposed quotas and other restrictions on immigrants in the early 1920s, many Jews who had planned to immigrate to the United States instead found Belgium a receptive home. Although few Jews became Belgian citizens during the interwar years, many immigrants joined the Jewish communities in Antwerp and Brussels, entering into such businesses as the Antwerp diamond trade.Belgium possesses several unique sets of records with valuable information for genealogists. Tens of thousands of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe moved to and through Belgium starting at the end of the 19th century and continuing up to World War II. Records exist on nearly all of them. Even if a relative lived in Belgium for such a short while that no vital records, such as birth certificates or marriage licenses, would have been generated, archival documents likely exist that include genealogical information on the relative and his or her parents (including birth dates and birth towns).

[Ed. Note: This article was first published in AVOTAYNU, Volume XXVII, Number 3, Fall 2011, page 14. Back issues and current subscriptions to AVOTAYNU may be obtained at wwe.avotaynu.com]

This article discusses files available in three different archives. Two archives hold records from the Belgian Police des Étrangers, which tracked foreigners living in Belgium—the National Archives in Brussels and the Felix Archives in Antwerp. A third archive, Kazerne Dossin in Mech­elen, houses records of Jews who lived in Belgium in 1940 when the Germans invaded.

Police des Étrangers

Belgium came into existence as a modern country in 1830 and shortly thereafter established a system to monitor foreigners living within its borders. The government established the Police des Étrangers (Aliens’ Police) to track and maintain files on foreigners. Each local government office in Belgium that interacted with a foreigner was required to report that interaction to the local branch of the Police des Étrangers, and documents were added to the local file on that immigrant. In addition, the local branch forwarded a duplicate of the file to a central office in Brussels. Thus, for every interaction between a foreigner and the government, at least two documents were created. In the 19th century, the efforts of the Police des Étrangers were hampered by the lack of technology needed to track so many people, but by the turn of the 20th century, the police had become quite good at managing the task. If an alien lived in Belgium for more than two weeks starting in the early 20th century, it is almost certain that a file exists on him or her somewhere in Belgium. After World War I, the files may include photographs of family members.

The first Police des Étrangers file was opened in the late 1830s. By 1889, they had acquired more than 500,000 files and opened the one-millionth file in 1912. Today, the total number of files exceeds five million. From the start, each locality stored the original documents, and the central office in Belgium stored duplicates of all the documents in all files from across the country. This process long predated computers and was prone to human error, and it is possible that records never arrived at the central archive or that files that arrived at the central archive were later lost by the local archive.

Indeed, most local archives of the Police des Étrangers were not maintained and were destroyed when the files were closed. Files were closed when the immigrant naturalized as a Belgian citizen died or left the country. If a person returned to Belgium, even for a short visit, additional information might be added to his or her file. Luckily for Jewish genealogists, Antwerp, with its large Jewish population, preserved its local archive of Police des Étrangers files. The Antwerp archives has microfilmed the entire file back to 1840 and makes the indexes for the period 1840–1930 publicly available by a method described below. It is unusual for an archive to release such an index to personal records; why Antwerp did is discussed below.

The central archives of the Police des Étrangers relocated from time to time, but currently all files from the 1830s through 1943 are housed at the National Archives in Brussels. Files are indexed according to the date they were opened, so that while files may exist in the National Archives for dates only through 1943, the files themselves may include records from much later dates. Documents from the 1970s have been found in files opened in the 1930s.

Officially, files containing personal data held in the National Archives (such as these alien records) are available only to researchers 100 years after they were opened. About 30,000 files are made available on average each year based on the Belgian privacy rules—but individuals and family members are permitted to view the files earlier. Strictly speaking, this means immediate family, but the authorities have been flexible with this definition, particularly with files of family members who may have perished in the Holocaust.

Generally, each individual or couple had a file. Young children were included in their parents’ file, and if they remained non-citizens when they became adults, they received their own files.

Who Are in These Files?

Tens of thousands of Jews passed through Belgium during first half of the 20th century, and the files reflect the wide variety of Jewish people born elsewhere who lived in Belgium. The millions of files in the National Archives in Brussels are indexed based on a series of numbers that correspond to different time periods. The first series incorporates the earliest files until 1880 (generally less relevant to Jewish researchers), the second series from 1880 until 1930, and the third series for 1930–1973. Series for records opened later than 1973 are not available yet in the National Archives, but would likely be less useful for genealogical research in any case. To give a glimpse of the range of files available, archivists at the National Archives looked up several typically Jewish surnames in their files and provided the total number of files from each of the series: (Table 1).

Table 1. Sample Surname Distributions

	1st Series	2nd Series	3rd Series	Total
	–1880	1880–1930	1930–1973
Brenner	5	48	215	268
Cohen	79	444	1386	1909
Goldstein	27	679	598	1304
Horowitz	11	320	444	775
Silberman(n)	3	46	165	214

The number of files with these typically Jewish surnames increases in each series (except for Goldstein, which decreases from the second series to the third series). Where had these families come from? The records are indexed by surname only, not geographical location, so it was not possible to obtain a listing of towns with the number of files from each town. The archivists did, however, supply the origins of the 46 Silberman(n)s in files that were opened in the second series (1880–1930). These aliens came from Egypt, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States; some even were born in Belgium but were officially “foreigners.”

Felix Archives

The Felix Archives, which is the Antwerp city archives, is the only major archive (other than the National Archives, which contains the central files) that has preserved the local Police des Étrangers. As discussed above, all materials in these local files should also appear in the central files held by the National Archives, but some discrepancies occur. The Felix Archive will not answer e-mail messages nor help with research in these files. They have, however, provided something not available elsewhere—an index to their files. In the years that these files were being compiled, indexes were kept in the form of index books for various periods. (The central archive used index cards.) The Felix Archives has scanned the index books and made them available online.

The index on the archives’ website, www.felixarchief. be, is hard to navigate and is written in Flemish, but two strategies exist to view the index through other sites. Researchers can view the index books without an intermediary to determine if their family members are mentioned. For this reason, we find it is best to start our research with the Felix Archives records search page at http://zoeken.felixarchief.be/zHome/Home.aspx. The first method to view the indexes of the Antwerp Police des Étrangers files is to use a searchable interface available at the LDS (Mormon) website, FamilySearch.org. The Mormons have indexed the Antwerp index books and made them searchable online.

A search for the surname Trauring yields eight results: Naftali Trauring (b. 1861 in Lancut, in 1886–1900 series); Frieda Trauring (b. 1885 in New York, in 1916–30 series); Mozes Trauring (b. 1887 in New York, in 1916–30 series); Samuel Trauring (b. 1911 in Rzeszow, in 1916–30 series); Jacob Trauring (b. 1915 in Vienna, in 1916–30 series); Naftali Trauring (b. 1920 in Rzeszow, in 1916–30 series); Abraham Joseph Trauring (b. 1894 in New York, in 1916–30 series); and Leo Traurig (b. 1885 in Wisnitz, in 1916–30 series). Like the central files in the National Archives, the Antwerp records are indexed in separate series, for the years 1840–74, 1875–80, 1881–85, 1886–1900, 1901–15 and 1916–30. Those series are the ones that are publicly available. Later series exist for 1931–50, 1951–61, 1962–70 and 1971–90, but privacy laws make these unavailable to the public at this time. It might be possible to view the 1931–50 index images on microfilm onsite in the Felix Archive, but the archives has not posted them online.

In the FamilySearch.org site, a click on the name Mozes Trauring (the author’s great-grandfather) yields most of the same information that was given in the search results, e.g., name, time period, date and place of birth—with an important addition: a series of numbers. The first and most important is the original file number assigned in Antwerp to Mozes Trauring’s Police des Étrangers file. The page number is the actual page number in the index book for the 1916–30 series, which can be useful when browsing the actual pages, but usually is not needed. The other numbers are part of FamilySearch.org’s internal indexing system.

The detail page also permits one to view the original scanned index page, which includes information not found on the detail page, such as given and maiden name of Mozes’ wife and information on three sons, including full date of birth (year of birth only is given on the FamilySearch.org detail page). Because of the additional information, researchers should always look at the original page. The Felix Archives website is written in Flemish and difficult to navigate; therefore, the author has created a browser interface for the images on his website. Researchers may go to http://trauring.net/antwerp to navigate in English through the images posted on the Felix Archives website.

How To Obtain a Copy of a File

Since the Felix Archives does not offer services to researchers, a somewhat complicated system must be used to obtain a file after obtaining its number. Download a PDF file from the Felix Archives website. Use the link on the page given at the end of this article. It lists all the files and corresponding microfilm the files are on and in which cabinet and drawer the microfilm is located. Someone who lives in Belgium may visit the Felix Archives, access the correct cabinet and drawer, remove the microfilm and use a microfilm reader to view the file. Microfilm readers at the Felix Archives can scan the files directly to a USB disk at no charge.

Researchers who do not live in Belgium or do not have a friend who does and who can visit the archives, have another option. The archives operates a discussion forum at www.geschiedenisvanantwerpen.be/forum. The forum has a section called Opzoekingen (search) where one may post the name, file number, microfilm number, cabinet and drawer numbers and ask if someone will retrieve and send the file via e-mail. Usually volunteers will do so for reasonable requests. The author posted a request to this forum and received a file within a week. Although the forum language is Flemish, Google Translate can navigate the site well enough to register and post a request. Set Google Translate to translate from Dutch (since Flemish is a close cousin of Dutch). Of course, anyone may make a personal, onsite visit.

File Contents

Because the files reflect all interactions the foreigner had with the Belgium government, they may include a variety of interesting documents. Usually each file will have a registration document that includes the name of each person in the family, where and when each was born, and photographs if they were in Belgium after World War I. In addition, the names, birth years and locations of the parents of the father and sometimes of the mother also will be recorded. Such information may be helpful in tracing back one generation further.

The Police des Étrangers files in the Felix Archives are for the city of Antwerp only, but in the 1930s Antwerp was smaller than it is today. Towns near Antwerp, such as Bercham, which had a large Jewish population, were essentially suburbs, but not part of the city of Antwerp itself. Thus, a relative who lived in Bercham may have said they lived in Antwerp, but officially, they would not be expected to appear often in the Police des Étrangers files for the city of Antwerp (although they probably would have had occasional interaction with the government offices in Antwerp). Thus, the Felix Archives file for the family of Mozes Trauring and his children includes only six pages for the parents and three children. In the National Archives, where the files hold records from all localities including Berchem, Mozes and his children each have separate files—Mozes with 18 pages, Sam with 6 pages, Jacob with 20 pages, and Naftali with 5 pages. In addition, Mozes’ father, Isak, who did not have a file in the Antwerp records, has his own eight-page file in the National Archives, including a photograph.

How to Access the Police des Étrangers Files In the Belgian National Archives

The Archives Générales du Royaume (Belgian National Archives) houses the archives of the federal government of Belgium. The National Archives now holds the Police des Étrangers files opened through 1943 (although, as mentioned, the contents of those files extend well past 1943 if the person in the file returned to Belgium after that date). Unlike the Felix Archives, the National Archives is helpful about accessing the records it holds. An e-mail to them with the details of a search usually elicits a response within a few days. Researchers may search its index on microfilm onsite and then request access to the files, but it is not necessary to do so. Alternatively, first correspond with the archivists by e-mail, (they are fluent in English), and when they identify the file numbers of interest, ask for digital copies of all the documents on CD or even delivered online (if the number of pages is not too large). The obvious advantage of the second procedure is its convenience; the disadvantage is the fee per page of scanning. Those who do not reside in Belgium must send funds via bank transfer. Fees are approximately 30 euros per page copied, plus a per CD charge of 10 euros and shipping costs.

How to Request Information from the National Archives

Provide as much information as possible about the individuals sought when writing to the National Archives. The collection comprises more than five million files, and the index is rudimentary. Send any information that may help identify the correct files. For example, do not just send a name, but send the name, nicknames, birth date, birth location, spouse’s name (with maiden name, if applicable), names of parents, names of children, the years they may have lived in Belgium—whatever might help differentiate one record from the millions of others. Send the e-mail message to archive.generales@arch.be with the subject: Police des Étrangers Files.

Folder Cover

When requesting information from the National Archives, also ask the archivists to check the names on the folder covers of each file they find. The folders of each physical file have several fields of information that may include the names and file numbers of relatives (children, siblings and others) who have their own files, as well as other related people, who might include more distant relatives (nieces or nephews) or even business associates. If an archivist responds with the file numbers of files of family members, be sure to ask if the folder cover listed any other relatives and, if so, their names and file numbers.

Ordering Records

After compiling a final list of the files to order, send a request to the reproduction services desk, repro@arch.be, for scans of the pages. Send a list of the files, including name and file number for each file, as well as your full name and address. You will receive an invoice for the scanning service and for mailing one or more CDs with the images. If ordering only a few images, ask that they provide the images online. Unless otherwise requested, the resultant images will be JPGs, although, if encouraged strongly, they may send the larger TIFF images, which tend to look better. Fees are paid by bank transfer only. To save money, try to place one order for all the files of interest instead of multiple orders over time; one order is more economical.

Kazerne Dossin

The Germans deported more than 25,000 Jews from Belgium during World War II, 44 percent of Belgium’s Jewish population. The deportations were made from Mechelen, a town about halfway between the major Jewish communities of Antwerp and Brussels, well-connected to the rail network. The building used to collect and deport the Jewish population of Belgium, known as Kazerne Dossin, later housed the Jewish Museum for Deportation and Resistance (JMDR). The JMDR worked to collect as much information as possible on the Jews who lived in Belgium during the German occupation, especially those who were deported. Early in 2011, the JMDR closed, to prepare for a new museum being built across the street from the original building, to be called the Kazerne Dossin Memorial Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights.

The documentation center has undertaken a number of important preservation and digitization projects. These projects include the preservation of the Belgian Register of Jews (undertaken in 1940 by local authorities of all Jews above the age of 15), the Association of Jews in Belgium (otherwise known as the Judenrat) which filled out “membership” cards in 1942 of all Jews in Belgium, and the German deportation lists which document everyone deported from Mechelen, primarily to Auschwitz. The center also has many other records related to the Jewish population; in fact they are working to digitize the Police des Étrangers files from the National Archives on everyone who was deported. They have already scanned photographs from those files for an earlier project to depict the faces of the Jews killed by the Germans.

Requesting Information from Kazerne Dossin

Of the three archives discussed here, Kazerne Dossin may be the easiest to access. If your relatives may have lived in Belgium in 1940 when the Germans occupied the country, consider sending an e-mail to assistant archivist, Dorien Styven, dorien.styven@kazernedossin.be, requesting a search of the records. As with the National Archives, include all known details–such as maiden names, birth dates and locations; the more information provided, the better.

Search Strategy

The following suggestions represent useful steps in seeking information on Belgian family. Genealogists with family members who lived in Antwerp should search the Felix Archives Police des Étrangers files on both the Family Search.org site and the trauring.net/antwerp index browser. Retrieve the files either by visiting the archives in person, having someone go to the archives, or request help on the online forum. If the family lived in Belgium in 1940, check with Kazerne Dossin for records from the German occupation. Some people appear in the original 1940 registration, but not in later registrations, because they either escaped or were killed before the second registration and deportations of 1942. Because Kazerne Dossin currently is digitizing many of the Police des Étrangers files, it may be unnecessary to order records from the National Archives (although this project is not yet completed).

Using all known information, including any new information gleaned from the above two searches, contact the National Archives to determine what records it holds as well. Be sure to request a review of the connected files listed on the folder covers of each file found. After receiving copies of files from the National Archives, look for any additional information. If new names appear, ask both Kazerne Dossin and the National Archives if files exist for these individuals.

The author has collected all the links needed to do this research and posted them to a page on his blog, http://www.bloodandfrogs.com/p/belgium.html, which he plans to update as he acquires additional information on these rec­ords. Additional information about the Police des Étrangers files appears in the introduction of his Antwerp index browser at http://trauring.net/antwerp.