The city archive stores documents, city bills, files, registers as well as picture and sound documents. The holdings cover a period from the 12th century to the immediate present. Their volume amounts to a total of nine kilometers of shelving. The Duisburg City Archive is thus one of the largest municipal archives in North Rhine-Westphalia.

You will find in the City Archive

• some 3,000 medieval charters documenting central municipal rights and obligations. The oldest document in the Duisburg City Archives is a royal charter from 1129.
• municipal bills, registers and files since the beginning of the early modern era. The City Archives have a complete series of minutes of the city council from 1538 onwards. city invoices from 1348 onwards provide an insight into the city's financial system, but also into the everyday life of its citizens. Files shed light on the political and social situation in the city of Duisburg from the perspective of municipal administrative offices, especially in the period from the 18th to the 21st century.
• Documents, registers and files from the formerly independent, later incorporated cities such as Ruhrort, Meiderich, Hamborn and Rheinhausen.
• About 4,000 registers of civil status, which are a central source for Duisburg family research; about two thirds of the registers are already available in digitalized form. For the older period since the 17th century, the City Archive preserves family history sources, including copies of all Duisburg church records (17th century to 1874) and all address books published in Duisburg from 1833 onwards.
• Documents of non-urban origin, which provide insight into the urban world beyond the official perspective. These include in particular some 80 estates of important Duisburg personalities, the records of clubs and associations as well as 4,000 maps, 13,000 building plans and 4,000 posters.
• about 50,000 photos on the history of the city of Duisburg in the 20th century. The photos are arranged according to topographical and thematic aspects and most of them can be viewed directly in the reading room.
• a largely complete collection of Duisburg daily newspapers from the middle of the 19th century onwards; predecessors of today's daily newspaper from the 18th century are also kept in the archive. Since the 1960s, the newspapers have been evaluated in the archive on a daily basis and articles are recorded in a collection of newspaper clippings on individual topics and biographies.
• an extensive reference library on the history of the city with about 50,000 volumes, which is accessible via a keyword catalog, among other things.

To the inventory of the municipal archives