A Brief History of Hungarian Private Family Archives
This initiative is closely aligned with the Foundation’s core mission: to identify, document, and, where possible, transfer private archives into public collections or create digital copies of them. County by county, we aim to commission researchers who possess local knowledge and archival expertise to gather all available 19th–20th century references (e.g. in scholarly literature, published sources, press reports) to once-existing private archives within a given region. Their task is to document all content-related and quantitative data associated with these archives and investigate the fate of those that never entered—or only partially entered—public collections. The resulting documentation will highlight numerous overlooked collections and enable the Foundation to conduct further research to trace missing archives. As a pilot phase, the project begins in three counties in the Transdanubian region of western Hungary.
Early Modern Transcriptions of Medieval Documents in the Registers of the Places of Authentications
A long-standing goal of Hungarian archival research has been to gather all surviving medieval charters related to Hungary. One underexplored source type is the early modern registers of the so-called “places of authentication” (loca credibilia) kept by ecclesiastical institutions. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, many individuals presented their old charters at these official places to have authenticated copies made—often to protect the fragile originals during lawsuits or to preserve the rights conferred in documents of increasingly bad material condition. The texts of such charters were frequently copied into official registers, surviving even when the originals were lost. Researchers must review these registers page by page—often hundreds of pages long—to identify and document each transcribed medieval charter. Our forthcoming volumes will publish this documentation and the complete texts of the previously unknown medieval documents, accompanied by scholarly notes and explanations. Two volumes are currently in preparation.