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

Tolna Megyei Levéltár (Tolna County Archives)

them (on history, geography, popular customs and art, meals, recreation, etc.). About three quarters of the villages of the county are figuring in the conscription (the data of the Tamási district are missing). Among the records of the capitalistic period the first place is due to those dealing with the events of the bourgeois revolution and the fight for freedom in 1848-1849. Our archives expended a great care on collecting the material of village administration. Hence we have, beside the records of county and district administration, a considerable mass of the journals of the bodies of representatives and the papers of local boards. The bulk of the material dates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but 24 parishes have records from the eighteenth century as well. We also preserve the 41,5 running metres of the National Inspectorate of Silk-Culture, a material which is the most complete for the study of silk industry (silkworm breeding and cocooneries) in Hungary. In this archival group dating from 1886 to 1950 one finds data not only for Hungary, but for Slovakia, Roumania (Transylvania) and Croatia as well. From the socialist period the records of the period of the Hungarian Councils' Republic are of an outstanding value. They are mirroring, how the first dictatorship of the proletariat started to transform society and economy. The records are unselected, but not complete. Their physical condition has been deteriorated in World War II and they still need restoration. Many villages and several districts have bequeathed the journals of their directorates to posterity. Alas, the journals taken from the sittings of the county and Szekszárd city directorates are missing. The records of the popular organs of power and the commissions formed after the liberation in 1944 and 1945 are preserved without selection. They are exact mirrors of the political life of the time and of the solutions of the problems in the county between 1945 and 1948, the period of democratic revolution in Hungary. The material collected from the agricultural cooperatives is also worth attention, especially from the years between 1950 and I960, as it gives a true picture, directly or indirectly, on the socialist transformation of agriculture and also on changes in social structure. In the last decades Tolna County Archives have been popularized by the county newspaper several times. Technical articles were published in the