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

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

circumstances in an administrative selection. The activity of county selfgovernment was restricted by the gradually built centralised administration after 1867 and the equally centralised judicial organisation from 1872. Owing to the gradual transformation of administration, the county has become the executive organ of government, also the initiative of the middle (district) and lower level organs (parish) has been gradually diminished. Besides the age had no sense for the preservation of records of the middle and lower level organs in the archives. The source value of the archival material of this period is lessened also by the fact that the records of the existent central organs underwent a strong selection, led by the points of view of administration only, before coming into archival custody. Nevertheless the journals of the assemblies and the copious records of the elected county chief, the sub-prefect still contain important data to the history of the area. Among the records taken over after the decree-law of 1950 the archival group embracing the papers of the Nyírbátor Franciscan Convent from 1717 to 1948 illustrates church life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the fragmentarily saved archives of some less endowed noble families, very active in national politics, contain unique data to the property and the way of life of the landed gentry of this region in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Most valuable data as to the settlement, possessions and land use of the various villages and the geographical location of historical place names are furnished by the collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century manuscript maps. Up to 1949 the organs of the bourgeois period were working in the system developped after 1867 with some changes.War events in 1944 and 1945, however, totally disintegrated the administrative organization of the bourgeois period. Till the establishment of central power (22 December 1944) the revival was a care of the spontaneously formed local organs (National Commissions, village Land-Claimants Commissions). Steps taken in the right time ensured that the records of these popular commissions organized at village level have come, although with some defects, into archival custody. Without them it would be hopeless to describe the political events of the new period starting with 1945, the land reform, the economic revival. The records of the archives prior to 1849 have contemporary indices (to subjects, places and names) and calendars (registers containing extracts of the records), made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries according to