Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Use of DataThe Arquivo Público do Estado do Ceará (APEC) was created on 6 September 1916 as an organ linked to the state Public Library. In 1921 it was transferred to the Secretaria do Interior e Justiça, and in 1968 it was definitively brought under the umbrella of the Secretaria da Cultura do Estado do Ceará (Secult Ceará), the ministry with which it remains affiliated today. The archive moved through several locations in central Fortaleza before settling in 1993 at its current headquarters, the Solar dos Fernandes Vieira, a neoclassical mansion dating from 1880 built for the family of deputy Miguel Fernandes Vieira and subsequently owned by the federal government. The solar was restored by the Ceará state culture secretariat and is a nineteenth-century heritage landmark.
The APEC holds an estimated 32 kilometres of documents covering the administration of the former capitania (colonial province), the imperial province, and the current state of Ceará from 1703 to the present. Its holdings include correspondence, administrative processes, reports, censuses, certificates, inventories, maps, and plans from the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as well as private archives and collections. The archive is especially noted for its comprehensive imperial-era documentation.
Highlights among its holdings include the death certificate of Padre Cícero (revered religious leader of the Brazilian Northeast); an eighteenth-century copy of the diary of Matias Beck's expedition to Ceará; the inventory of Tristão Gonçalves, president of the province; nineteenth-century land registries; and documentation on the Guarda Nacional (nineteenth century). Private collections include the Firma Boris Frères archive, documenting commercial activity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ceará, and the archive of ex-governor Virgílio Távora. The APEC also holds political police records (DOPS/Ceará) from the military dictatorship period.
The archive is open Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5 pm. Access is free. The archive has been undertaking ongoing digitisation of its collection, including a major project in partnership with FamilySearch beginning in 2018 to digitise notarial and civil registry records from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries for online genealogical research.
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