A Pest Megyei Levéltár. Levéltárismertető (Budapest, 2004)

Seventeen thousand meters of historical source/Introduction of the main archives

The screening committees came to existence due to the 1 5/1945. ME decree. Their role was to call different employees to screening procedures, and to inspect what kind of roles they had in the political life after September 1, 1939. There had to be at least one established at the district court towns but according to the Lord Lieutenant's requirements there could be more established and at other locations as well. Their members were delegated from political parties, just like in case of national committees. The screening committees were applied to remove politically unwanted public employees. Ceasing the screening procedures and terminating the committees was owing to a decree in 1948. Within the county, the town and the district screening committees there were usually separated committees dealing with for example the merchants, craftsmen, employees. At the county screening committee e.g. it was the appeal forum of the Committee I for the whole county, while the Committee II dealt with the cases of employees of the county and the central district

. In the archives they are usually the index books help to find people but in some cases they have to be checked one by one because of missing reference aids. There are the documents of the councils arranging landed property, and those of the land requiririg and land-leasing committees collected in this main archive. The documents originated from 70 settlements, mainly in 1 or 2 centimetres volumes. The people's screenmg committees (PSC) started their operation in 1958 and their documents are kept from this time. Their enacted tasks were wide ranging: they supervised public property, revealed abuses, cooperated in ceasing insufficiencies, etc. Their competence involved all fields of life: they could inspect economic activities of public administration institutes, plants, companies, cooperations, societies, private merchants and private craftsmen. Their functioning, later on, had been controlled several times until they ceased to exist in 1989. Our Archives holds the documents of people's controlling committees functioned at all district centre towns between 1958 and 1989, besides the documents of county committees. There are PSC-meeting reports, inspection documents, complaints and announcements in the material. MAIN ARCHIVE UNII XXIII - COUNCILS Currently this is the second largest volume main archive of the Pest County Archives, but in a few years, following the planned document collections, this will be the largest one. There are almost four thousand linear meters of documents of the 477 archives (county, district, town and settlement councils) stored in the archive up to now. In accordance with the Constitution of 1949 there were councils established and functioned as local authorities of state power in Hungary. The councils and their executive committees, taking over the tasks of the previous local governments and state authorities, had performed the local duties of public administration and represented the state power they carrying out economic-, social- and cultural tasks until their termination in 1990. Up to now we could mainly take over the documents of the 1950s and 1960s of all the documents of the departments of the Pest County Council because of our reduced storage 197