A Pest Megyei Levéltár. Levéltárismertető (Budapest, 2004)

Brief history of the Pest County Archives

the safest, in the newly built Town House between 1838 and 1841 and also employed a vice archive manager, being the only in the country. The valuable documents had deserved this distinguished handling. At the end of the 18

th century, a national awakening started and in connection with this the outstanding role of Pest County, the "Chief County", remained in the documents stored in the Archives. The role of the Archives proving the autonomy of the county with its documents decreased in the second part of the century. Although historical science has just revealed the Archives' role of preserving primary sources of past these years, the county management sponsoring the archives considered the former "major treasure" as a professional office of the county management. The archives had to take over a huge amount of documents due to the increased county administration, but proper storing was an unsolvable issue. These are the decades when the archives was located into the darkest, deepest, dampest places in the Town House, partly due to their increased size, and partly the increasing economic tasks, that resulted in using former archive rooms as offices. There were newer and newer tasks given to the Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun County Archives. Employees had to handle the daily documents as well. Although the county had excellent employees (Sándor Kőszeghy, Dezső Rexa), not even they could stop placing documents in the cellar or in the former prison. Later on, in the second half of the 1920s the county had only provided relatively appropriate storing locations following the instructions of the Minister of Internal Affairs. The county archives used these storage places and equipment until 2000. The former prisoner chapel was reconstructed into a ceremony hall in 1941 and handed over to the archives. The majority of Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun County Archives remained in damp places, which were inappropriate for storing documents. The initiatives of the county archives to save the documents of villages and districts did not bring great results: despite the notice, the very valuable part of the documents could not be taken over, and most of them got destroyed during and after World War II. The role of the county archives had significantly changed after World War II. According to the number 29 decree-law of year 1950 the former municipal archives became public archives. This way the tasks of the Pest County Archives included not only taking care of documents of the former county municipality but also taking over the historically valuable documents of public authorities, public offices, public institutes, families and companies of Pest County established in 1950. This decree significantly increased the tasks of the employees of the archives: they had to participate actively in the preparation for sorting documents, and in archival undertaking of documents. Even the name of the archives had changed: the official name of the institute became Pest County State Archives from 1950, Number 2 State Archives of Budapest from 1952, and Pest and Nógrád County State Archives after 1960, when the county archives took over the endangered archives of Nógrád County. The "county state archives" lasting till 1968 had significantly changed. The number of its employees increased from 9 to 19, the volume of its stored documents grew from 4725 linear meters to almost two and a half time greater, to 11044 linear meters. Due to the increase, the Archives' Management had to utilize more cellar storehouses outside 154