Tuesday and Wednesday this week were dedicated to a trip to Budapest. Besides grabbing a few books to be used as sources for RadixRef at secondary bookshops I also visited one of the branches of the Budapest City Archives.

This branch - currently housed in a rather strange building (a museum, formerly) in the mountainous area of Buda - contains files of court houses and public notaries of Budapest. There are two more branches of the city archives. The opening ceremony for the new building, where materials of all the branches should have been transferred, was planned for Autumn 2003 - now that's over. It looks February or March 2004 will be the date for the real launch - one can expect an interruption of services due to the move.

... Hey, but it means some good things to come, too. Archivists are working on a couple of databases that might be available on their website - and at least one of them might be accessible right from the opening at the new address. This is a database of decisions of Budapest courts regarding inheritance and last wills and testament cases - they have some 70-80,000 records now.

They also consider to continue with the old Budapest city directories - a project the realization of which Péter Király (mentioned earlier) did not think to be really likely -, and start building a new database of the family sheets of Budapest people from the infamous 1941 Hungarian national census.