Akta spraw sądowych i orzecznictwo sądowe z okresu II RP jako źródło historyczne. Węzłowe problemy kwerendy i metodyki archiwalnej na przykładzie badań nad fideikomisami familijnymi
Court Case Files and Court Judgments from the Second Republic of Poland as a Historical Source: Key Archival and Methodological Issues in an Example of Research on Family fideicommissa

Summary/Abstract: The article is the result of archival research, executed under the leadership of Prof. Zbigniew Naworski within the framework of an academic project financed by the National Science Centre (the OPUS 14 program). The author tries to show basic rules and problems associated with research on civil court case files in Polish archives from the interwar period. The starting points for his considerations are the history of Polish archival law on the criteria for the assessment of the archival value of court files, and the consequences of adopting them into practice. Besides that, he tries to emphasize how essential the archival finding aids are for this type of research, as well as how their absence is a key issue to the effectiveness of archival research. Those are crucial factors, especially when a legal historian needs to work on numerous, diffused, and not always organized archival collections. Unfortunately, this is an issue with interwar court case files. The author suggests how the archival staff might improve the shaping of the archival inventories on court case files, to make them more accessible and easier to work with. He also tries to demonstrate the advantages of creating other archival aids on this type of source material –especially archival descriptive inventories and indexes which are very helpful for preliminary research. In the end, the author shares his experiences of his attempts to reconstruct or regain lost court case files using other archival collections of sources of interwar family archives or barristers files.

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