German Archives (DDB; BW, NRW, Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse registers)

german-archives-mcp

An MCP server for German archives' finding aids and the vital registers German state archives have put online: search what German archives, libraries and museums have described in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and its archive portal Archivportal-D, read one entry with its place in the archive's fonds, find the civil or church register of a place for a year at the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Landesarchivverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz or the Hessisches Landesarchiv, and download a page of it to read.

The DDB is Germany's counterpart of DPLA, and for archives its counterpart of ArchiveGrid as well: archives deliver their finding aids to it, item by item, with signatures (call numbers), dates and the fonds each item belongs to. Some deliver images. Its version 2 API answers without a key.

The server covers every fonds of vital registers the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg has online (the Staatsarchiv Wertheim's civil-register duplicates, from 1870, are not yet in its online finding aids):

The Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen has put its civil registers (Zivilstands- and Personenstandsregister) online: the Rhineland's from 1798, and Westphalia's and Lippe's with some of their church-book duplicates, as far as the protection periods allow (births 110 years, marriages 80, deaths 30). The server searches them through the Archive in NRW portal and reads their pages from the Landesarchiv's image server.

The Landesarchivverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz's Personenstandsarchiv, part of the Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz, has put the civil registers of the state's north online in its virtual reading room APERTUS: Best. 657,001 onward, one fonds per Standesamt or Bürgermeisterei, mostly the former government districts of Koblenz and Trier, from 1798. About 59,000 birth, marriage and death registers have images there: by the archive's count (March 2026) some 32,000 whole registers, digitised district by district up to 1880 or 1895, and 28,000 registers of which only the name index is digitised. APERTUS delivers a register only as one PDF of the whole volume, so the server downloads a volume once, keeps it on disk for a few days, and takes each page asked for out of it.

The Hessisches Landesarchiv's Personenstandsarchiv keeps the secondary registers of every Standesamt in today's Hesse, from 1874 or 1876, in fonds HStAM 900 to 926, and has put them online to 1900 (births), 1930 (marriages) and 1965 (deaths). The server finds them in the catalogue of the Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS) and reads their pages from Arcinsys Hessen.

It works the way a careful genealogist does. A finding-aid entry says where a record is, not what it says: cite the archive and its signature, not the DDB. The page image is the evidence: read it before citing it, and cite the archive, the signature and the image number with the archive's permalink. A zero is not a negative: most German registers are not online, and many archives deliver nothing to the DDB.

Nothing here writes anywhere, and nothing here keeps a family tree. It sits beside dpla-catalog-mcp for American collections and snac-archives-mcp for finding which archive holds a family's papers.

This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Landesarchivverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz, the Hessisches Landesarchiv, LAGIS, or any archive whose finding aids it reads.

Tools

The server publishes eleven tools. All but the four image tools are read-only; each of those writes one new file and never overwrites one (rlp_image also keeps the volume PDFs it downloads in the cache folder).

The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and Archivportal-D

The registers at the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg

The civil registers at the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen

The civil registers in Rheinland-Pfalz (APERTUS)

The civil registers in Hesse (LAGIS and Arcinsys)

Housekeeping

Setup

You need Python 3.11 or later and uv. There is no key to request.

Without cloning. uvx fetches it from PyPI and runs it in one step:

uvx german-archives-mcp

From a clone, which is what you want if you will change it:

git clone https://github.com/ianderso/german-archives-mcp

cd german-archives-mcp uv sync uv run german-archives-mcp # stdio server, usually launched by the client

Either way the server speaks MCP over stdio, so you will normally let an MCP client start it rather than run it by hand.

Claude Desktop

{

"mcpServers": { "german-archives": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["german-archives-mcp"] } } }

A desktop app does not always inherit your shell's PATH. If the server fails to start because uvx cannot be found, give the full path that which uvx prints as the command.

Claude Code

claude mcp add german-archives -- uvx german-archives-mcp

Configuration

Nothing is required. A .env file in the directory the server starts in supplies anything the environment does not; only that directory is read.

An unusable value is reported on the first tool call as a not_configured result naming the variable.

How to read what comes back

• A DDB entry is a finding aid. The archive wrote it to say where a record is and roughly what it holds. It supports a research task (order the file, open the images), not a fact. Cite the archive and its signature (citation in ddb_item), and t