Dr. Péter Balázs: Guide to the archives of Hungary (Budapest, 1976)

Szabolcs-Szatmár Megyei Levéltár (Szabolcs-Szatmár County Archives)

them the journals of the affairs treated by the county nobilitary assemblies are preserved from 1550 to 1849 completely. The series of journals is equally complete in the bourgeois period (from 1850): they mirror the working of modern autonomy between 1861 and 1940, reaching over to the years from 1945 to 1949. But the assembly journals between 1940 and 1944 have been lost under unknown circumstances, as war events made the evacuation and the salvage of records necessary in October 1944. The series of the records of political-administrative and judicial (civil and criminal) activity of the nobilitary self-government (Acta politica et judicialia) begins with 1570. Besides the administrative and judicial records of the county there are tax assessments and popular conscriptions from the middle of the sixteenth century, made for various purpose; they are found either in the series Acta politica et judicialia, or in a separate series. According to central instruction and uniform points of view they have been inventorized in a list showing each piece. Among the boroughs of the county in the feudal period Nyírbátor has valuable archives; in the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries the borough was keen on preserving its privileges ensuring its liberties. The records furnish valuable data for the organisation and order of borough administration and jurisdiction. The records of the other borough, Nyíregyháza begin with 1754. The town depopulated in the former century has been resettled by the landlords with contractual villeins, having a restricted autonomy. After 1837, on the basis of a royal privilege, the Slovak settlers of the place created a unique privileged civic town administration. The borough archives have suffered considerable damage owing to carelessness prior to the arrangement in 1872-1880, still they are a rich source of economic, social and cultural life in the town. The feudal (pre-1848) records of both counties are not only important sources of the history of administration and jurisdiction, but they also reflect national political events in their — often singular — data. Such are the records of the diets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the instructions given to the elected deputies of the county and the reports made by them in the first half of the nineteenth century. On the contrary our records from the bourgeois period (1850-1945) are significant for local history only. Those of the absolutism from 1850 to 1859, so valuable in other archives, have disappered in 1892-1893 under unknown