Saint Mary’s University

Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

The Importance of Archives and the Study of History

1. What are Archives?

It is a nation’s documentary history and collective memory.

Records of organizations that include trade or business, religious bodies, government agencies
or even individual persons.

Referred to as archival sources, these are historical records most commonly referred to as
documents or manuscripts.

Usually old, transcribed by hand using a brush, pen or pencil on paper or cloth.

2. Importance of Archives

Help people connect to their family, neighborhood, communities and nation by showing a
glimpse of where they have been and how they got where they are now.

Help form a sense of identity and community.

Provide accountability and transparency by giving evidence of past actions and decisions.

Preserved for cultural and historical reasons (allow researchers to document fully and preserve
the character and identity of an individual or organization).

Archival materials need not be very old to be important. Its value lies in its usefulness to the
creator or the custodian. It may no longer be of pressing value for administrative reasons but of
great value to researchers.

They are not just an indulgence…they are of legal and administrative necessity.

From the centennial publication of the National Archives of the Philippines:

These documents reveal generations of societies that lived under an administrative

structure that documented births, royal decrees, political situations, crimes, natural disasters,
health institutions, schools, business inventions, public works and almost everything related
to the execution of the government’s functions and its people’s responses between the 17 th
and 19th centuries, and through which not only the known historical events, but also daily
lives of people are uncovered. Their values however, go beyond their existence or in their
having been produced many centuries ago, but because they can serve a purpose today.

In 2011 UNESCO adopted the Universal Declaration on Archives to formally recognize

the importance of archives in society. It was drafted by the International Council on Archives.

3. Types of Records generally found in the Archives

Records come in different forms:

Paper documents (individual letters, paper files, handwritten bound volumes, scrap books,
press cuttings, printed constitutions, spiritual and devotional literature).

Born-digital documents (film reels, videos)

Digitized materials (floppy discs, CDS, DVDs)

Audio/visual recordings

Blueprints (architectural drawings, plans)

Photographs

Maps

4. Why keep archives and what should we keep?

Without archival recall or records to facilitate recall, agencies, governments and

nations will not have a perspective on which to base planning, no example of a precedent to
prevent administration from making, repeating or avoiding mistakes, no expert knowledge
other than inaccurate human memory, no means of proving entitlements or ownership, no
way of defending oneself against or responding to allegations of improper actions (Marriane
Cosgrave, Congretional Archivist, Dublin, Ireland).

Archives are part of the historical identity of an organization or nation. One can only
understand a society through the examination of their codes, customs, and activities.

Archives are tools of understanding, they provide the historical evidence to the development of
an entity.
The National Archives of the Philippines

• Home to about 60 million documents covering the four major periods of Philippine history.
• Final repository for the voluminous notarized documents of the country.

How was it created?

• It was the Treaty of Paris (December 10, 1898) which established the Office of Archives
(Spanish Division of Archives) under the Americans.
• Treaty urged the turn-over of documents from Spain and the Philippines.
• Philippine Commission Act No. 273 (October 21, 1901) established the Bureau of Archives
under the Department of Public Instructions.
• Philippine Library and Museum was renamed as the National Library with the archives as
component division.
• National Library was transformed into the Bureau of Public Libraries under the Department
of Education with the archives remaining as one of its divisions in 1947.
• Division of Archives was transferred to the newly created Bureau of Records Management
under the Department of General Services in 1958.
• This was renamed Records Management and Archives Office (RMAO) under the General
Administrative Administration in 1972, classified as a cultural agency attached to DECS
based on EO no. 285 in 1987.
• EO no. 80 transferred RMAO to NCCA in 1999.
• Acquired no permanent building of its own until 1997, when the Intendencia in Intramuros
was restored to be home of the National Archives.
• May 21, 2007, RA 9470 created the NAP.
• This law strengthened the government’s recordkeeping systems and administration
programs for archival materials.

Collections
• 60,000,000 archival documents with Spanish collection comprising an estimated
13,000,000 manuscripts from the 16th to the 19th c with 400 titles on various aspects of
Philippine History under Spanish rule such as:

1. Royal decrees of Spanish monarchs, reports of Spanish governors-general, documents

on Filipino uprisings, records of different provinces and towns, royal titles on lands and
landed estates
2. Pastoral letters, papers on churches, convents
3. Maps and architectural plans of buildings and houses
4. Civil records like birth, marriages, death
5. American and Japanese Occupation Records
6. Philippine National Guard records, civil service rosters, war trials
7. Recent records, Notarial documents, registers, civil service records
Most of the sources to be found in the Archives can be classified as “scraps of evidence”.

1. Estadistica or statistics (provinces, towns, number of inhabitants, marriages, births,

deaths, ganaderias or stocks of cattle, fincas or any kind or property yielding income).
2. Terrenos varias provincias (tax collection, accounts of public income, cedulas,
emigration, appointment of officials)
3. Erecciones del Pueblos (foundations of towns, barangays, visitas and sitios);
4. Actas de elecciones de gobernadorcillos y demas oficiales (records of electoral
proceedings of town officials including the local police and officers in charge of rice
fields)
5. Expedientes (despatches, complaints and other subjects like the suppression of
tulisanes)
6. Relaciones de los ministros de justicia nombrado (judges in provinces and regions)
7. Reales ordenes (appointments and resignations of officials)
8. Padrones de polista (lists of those who rendered forced labor by provinces/towns)
9. Intituciones docentes (records of schools, teachers and students)
10. Padron general de Chinos by provincias (census of the name, age, religion and place of
origin in China, residence in the Philippines)
11. Quintos (compulsory military service of Filipinos and mestizos in the military
establishment)
12. Cedularios (compilation of royal decrees issued by the king, as early as 1632)

There are various types of archival documents, each with a specific kind of information:

1. Acta- proceedings
2. Arancel- tariff of goods
3. Bando-circular
4. Decreto-decree
5. Expediente-dossier
6. Factura-receipts
7. Liquidacion-liquidation
8. Mapa- maps
9. Memoria-descriptive account of a place
10. fianza –surety/guarantee/bond
11. Oficio-memorandum
12. Orden-order
13. Pagamento-receipt of payment
14. Plano-plan
15. Pliego de condiciones-bill of specifications
16. Presupuesto-budget estimate
17. Protocolo-notary document
18. Tarifa-tariff
19. Telegrama-telegram
20. Testamento-testament or will
 National Library: Sources of local history

1. Filipiniana division of the National Library contains books, periodicals and manuscripts
on local history.
2. Many of these mostly written by friars were about the activities and missions of various
religious orders who worked in the Philippines.
3. Earliest local histories were written by Pigafetta and Transylvanus (Visayas and Palawan)
Translations are in the works of Blair and Robertson, vol. 33-34 on Pigafetta/vol 1 for
Transylvanus
4. Missionary accounts are significant for local history because they are the foundation of
towns which started as visitas.
5. Juan de Plasencia (Costumbres de los Tagalos- about customs of Tagalog region, but also
guide to adjudication cases involving Filipinos hence called the First civil Code of the
Phil.)
6. Pedro Chirino (Relacion de las islas Filipinas…1604) important source of local history of
Cebu, Leyte, Samar, Bohol and Mindanao.
7. Order of St. Dominic through Vicente Salazar (Historia de la Provincia Santisimo Rosario,
1742 have reference to Manila, Cagayan, Pangasinan, Panay)
8. Agustinian through Joaquin Martinez de Zuniga (Estadismo de las islas Filipinas, 1893)
covered the Visayas, Ilocos, Pangasinan, Pampanga, Manila.

Other sources are in the form of diccionarios:

1. Manuel Buzeta (Diccionario geografico, estadistico, historico de islas Filipinas, 1850-

1851) contaning statistics
2. Felipe Bravo (Diccionario de la administracion de Filipinas, 1887-1888 containing
texts of royal decrees in 15 volumes)

Local setting

Artifacts and oral testimonies count

Focus: religion, recreation, education, demographic patterns, social mobility rates, family networks, old
age, women

Sources: newspapers, speeches, interviews, films, slide shows, parish records (genealogical info like
birth, death, marriage, baptism, social mobility from one place to another)

Municipal records should be a mine of information/sources giving a more or less complete

characterization of the local community or town.
I.e. From the records section of the police department can be found records of recruitment, arrest,
detention , types of crime committed, peace and order general situationers, traffic, fire and statistics on
socio-civic and religious organizations.

From the municipal secretary’s office: ordinances, resolutions, administrative circulars, cultural
activities, barrio records, proceedings of the sangguniang bayan/town council.

Engineer’s office: town planning and development

Ecological data

Local History

Errectiones de Pueblos, 1990

N0. 1 Abra-Bohol

No. 2 Bulacan-Capiz

No. 3 Cavite-Laguna

No. 4. La-Union – Pampanga

No. 5. Pampanga-Zamboanga

Guia oficial de Filipinas contains census of tribute payers, non-tribute payers, population by provinces,
administrative and ecclesiastical system of the country.

Source: