The Rotterdam City Archives is the public memory of Rotterdam. Roughly 700 years of the city and regions history is available to visitors in our reading room or online. Our special collections contain hundreds of thousands of prints, photos, maps, films and audio, and more than 20 kilometres of paper archives, with even more digital and digitised material contained in our e-depot (digital repository).
Our holdings
The City Archive preserves records of Rotterdam city council. We also house the archives of local government from regional councils that do not currently have their own archival institution (e.g. Lansingerland, Albrandswaard, Ridderkerk and Barendrecht). In addition we also maintain the archives of a number of public institutions related to Rotterdam (The Environmental Agency DCMR, The Recreation Authority and the Hollandse Delta Waterboard).
The geneaological resources available in the Rotterdam City Archives include civil registers, census records and registers of births, marriages and deaths. We also have a unique collection of arrest and release records from the Rotterdam Police archive from the Second World War which may contain useful genealogical information from the period 1940 – 1945.
The archive has extensive collections of Rotterdam and the surrounding region, including photos, prints, illustrations, topographical maps, postcards, posters, films and audio clips. Many of these are freely available to download.
The Rotterdam City Archives houses the archives of the municipality of Rotterdam, as well as a number of surrounding municipalities and other government institutions. The archive also holds private archives from businesses, societies, associations, churches and other social initiatives from Rotterdam and region.
The archive holds public notary records from the period 1585 – 1935. A portion of these registers is digitised and searchable online.
The passenger registers of the Holland America Line from the years 1900 – 1920 are available online.
The registers contain the names of businesses, shops, and people from the period 1808 to 1939 are available online.
We are open on Monday and Tuesday from 9.00 AM to 1.00 PM and Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.