Worms city archive

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Worms city archive

The Worms City Archives in the Raschi House
The Worms City Archives in the Raschi House
Archive type Municipal Archives
Coordinates 49 ° 38 '0.1 "  N , 8 ° 21' 58.6"  E Coordinates: 49 ° 38 '0.1 "  N , 8 ° 21' 58.6"  E
place Worms
Visitor address Hintere Judengasse 6
founding 13th century or 1880
scope 3.5 km of files, 2,800 documents and around 620,000 photographs
Age of the archive material 11th century to date
ISIL DE-2202 (Institute for Urban History Worms)
carrier City of Worms
Organizational form City Administration Department
Website https://www.worms.de/de/kultur/stadtarchiv/

The Worms City Archive in the Raschi-Haus is the municipal archive of the City of Worms . It preserves the written and pictorial tradition from more than 900 years of city history and makes them accessible and usable. The city archive is also the office of the Worms Antiquities Association . It also looks after archives for some of the communities in the former Worms district .

history

The oldest surviving document is the well-known exemption from customs duties by Emperor Heinrich IV. For the Worms from January 1074. During the second half of the 12th century, a legally viable municipality became apparent. At that time, the archive was probably housed in the town hall or Bürgerhof on the corner of Hagenstrasse and Bürgerhofgasse, which has been in evidence since the 13th century.

The most profound and momentous turning point for the archival tradition was the destruction of the city in the spring of 1689 as a result of the War of the Palatinate Succession . Only the most valuable parts of the archive could be saved by the council in the Frankfurt exile. With numerous buildings in the city, the registry in the “Neue Münze”, almost all council and court minutes, extensive files and all documents relating to the city's financial management in the Bürgerhof were burned. In the 18th century, too, the archive had to be relocated several times due to armed conflicts, for example to Frankfurt am Main in 1703 and to Hanau in 1734/36, which led to noticeable losses. In the 1770s and 1780s, the town clerks Johann Christoph Lautz (1706–1776) and Johann Ludwig Hallungius (1732–1812), who was in office until 1804, repeatedly tried to keep order. In 1793/95, after another escape to Frankfurt, it was completely disordered and stored again in the Bürgerhof, where it sustained considerable damage. It was not until March 1838 that the municipal council commissioned the grammar school teacher Georg Lange to organize the documents and prepare an inventory. After Lange, who undoubtedly lacked the necessary archival expertise, had already been withdrawn from the archives in March 1839, the holdings remained semi-organized. The council went beyond this disinterest when it released large parts of the accounting books and files for destruction in October 1844.

A comprehensive reorganization was only achieved in the years after 1880 by the Basel private lecturer in history Heinrich Boos (1851-1917) with the support of the leather industrialist Cornelius Wilhelm von Heyl zu Herrnsheim . The documents and files that have now been recorded have been given a new representative place in the archives of the town hall. In October 1898, the high school professor August Weckerling (1846-1924) was appointed for the archive, the library and the Paulusmuseum. In February 1922 Friedrich M. Illert (1892–1966) was hired with the title “Director of the City Library and Archive”. In his activity reports published since 1926, Illert repeatedly pointed to the massive problem of space and the lack of urgently needed archive staff as well as the intolerable state of order of the newer archive materials. In 1934, the municipal cultural institutes were set up and the city's cultural institutions - city archives, city ​​library , public library, picture gallery and city ​​museum - were combined. Despite the relocations that began in 1939 until 1943, the Second World War, especially the bombing on February 21, 1945 , hit archival records hard. In addition to the archive administration with its registers and finding aids, the more recent files of the city administration, newspapers, photos and films as well as some personal papers were lost. The repatriation of the rescued cultural assets was completed in 1950 and the archive was initially set up in the Christophelturm of the Andreasstift (now the Museum of the City of Worms).

During the 1950s, there was a gradual reorganization of the stocks, defining the tectonics that are essentially still valid today . The urgent question of accommodation could be eased somewhat by moving to the Haus zur Münze on Marktplatz in 1963, whereby the older archives remained in the vault of the Imperial City Archives in the town hall . In succession to his father, the archaeologist Georg Illert (1925–1991) took over the management of the cultural institutes in 1959/60 and from 1964 Fritz Reuter (* 1929) was head of the city archives. In the course of the reorganization on January 1, 1980, the city archives became an independent office. In November 1982, it was able to move into the rebuilt Rashi House in the Hinteren Judengasse together with a Jewish Museum and the Lower Monument Protection Authority. It has been under the management of Gerold Bönnen since May 1996 .

Tectonics and stocks

  1. City of Worms
  2. Incorporated suburbs
  3. Schools and charities
  4. Associations, institutions and parties
  5. Church Archives
  6. Herrnsheimer Dalberg Archive
  7. Estates and estate splinters
  8. Company archives, chambers, corporations
  9. Family archives, Heyl estates
  10. Musician bequests and collections
  11. Collections and Audiovisual Sources
  12. Worms newspapers
  13. Verbandsgemeinde Eich
  14. Verbandsgemeinde Monsheim
  15. Photo department

In total, around 3500 linear meters of archive material are stored in the Raschi House and the three branch offices, the old archival vault in the town hall, in the Ernst Ludwig School and in the administration building at Adenauerring 1.

The Imperial City Archive comprises around 2,800 documents from the 11th to 19th centuries, files, official registers and chronicles from the 15th to 19th centuries. The subsequent city files consist of documents from the municipality 1792–1814 and the city administration of Worms from 1815. Sources that are particularly important for genealogists are the church records dating back to the late 16th century and the civil status registers from the period up to 1875. Can be found in the collections of the city archive numerous posters, plans and maps, an extensive graphic collection and audio-visual material. The photo archive keeps the rich photographic tradition of the city and its districts since the 19th century with around 500,000 negatives and 120,000 current digital photos.

In addition, a service library specializing in Worms and regional history is available to users.

literature

  • Gerold Bönnen (Ed.): The Worms City Archive and its holdings . Landesarchivverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz, Koblenz 1998. ISBN 3-931014-40-1 .
  • Gerold Bönnen (ed.): History of the city of Worms. Theiss, Stuttgart 2005. ISBN 3-8062-1679-7 .
  • Der Wormsgau , scientific journal of the city of Worms and the Altertumsverein Worms e. V. Annually since 1926. ISSN  0084-2613 .

Web links