Archives communales de Jette / Gemeentearchief Jette

The parish register served as the register of civil status but this practice came to an end during the French Revolution.

31 October 1796 : last entry in the parish registers of a birth on the territory of Jette-Ganshoren (this document is still in the municipal archives).

22 Vendémiaire year VIII ( 14 October 1799) : first entry of a birth on an official civil document.

17 November 1841 : date of a document stating that André François Vandendriessche, among other functions, was at that time performing the duties of archivist.

1877 : the town council misses the opportunity to acquire a number of documents from the former premonstratensian abbey. The documents returned to their owner and there is no trace of them afterwards: the municipal council never knew the content of the documents.

1925 : Mr Bessemans proposes to split up the archive files.

1932 : Mr. Dusong became exclusively attached to the archives department for six months and managed to bring the documents together by file and to arrange them chronologically as much as possible. A report dated 6 June 1932, signed by the person responsible, shows that most of the files were arranged not too "catholic" and without historical interest: his task was only to bring order to the existing archives, and in the same report he points out that the archives have no value and that they could be burnt without any problem. Fortunately, this will not happen.

1941 : Mr Rubens is commissioned to supervise a thesis on the preservation of Jette's archives. But at this time, rumours also begin to circulate about the formation of Greater Brussels and Mr Rubens' judicious proposals are postponed.

1942 : a decree appears in September 1942, abolishing the municipalities of the Brussels agglomeration and merging them into a single territory dependent on a single administration (Greater Brussels). The services of the municipality of Jette were thus spread across the four corners of the Brussels territory, causing great disorder and confusion in the administrative files: for two long years - until the liberation of Belgium in 1944 - the archive was left to its fate as never before...

A new problem surfaced at the end of World War II, when, due to paper shortages and a recycling campaign to collect raw material for paper production, the Jette municipality's archives suffered the final blow and a large part of the administrative and historical documents were destroyed or lost. At the time, heads of departments could decide for themselves whether it was appropriate to keep or destroy documents they no longer used. As a result, there was a lot of confusion about archive management.

2 October 1944: the College of Aldermen appointed Mr Genin as head of the archives department. From 1944 to 1957, he works on the systematic reorganisation of the municipal archives. The archivist is then the only person authorised to proceed with the destruction of administrative archives.

25 March 1965: After reading a report by the public works department which mentioned the dangers posed by the presence of archives in the attic of the town hall, the College of Aldermen decided to move the archives to the cellars of the future municipal library.

30 May 1974 : The College of Aldermen instructs Mr Monnon, who has been archivist for a number of years, to arrange for the transfer of the archives from the attic of the town hall to the cellars of the new library, as soon as the metal shelving has been installed there. In preparation for that move, the destruction of the documents "which no longer have any significance" is proceeding. The condition of the attic rooms of the town hall led to the accelerated destruction of numerous documents, including some valuable items such as maps of the battle of Waterloo or deeds of sale or cession of land from before and during the French Revolution. Today, none of it remains.

The following archive files can be found in Jette (non-exhaustive list): road works, construction and maintenance of government buildings (schools, commissariat offices, swimming pools, town hall, hospital, etc.), surveys de commodo/incommodo, personnel management, meetings,…

Today, forty years after the archive was moved, it is still in the basement of the municipal library. Although there have been other archivists since then, numerous interventions and problems have affected the quality of the archive file.