Thank you to everyone for your advice.

I should say that I'm very familiar with the State Archives of
Belgium that are located in Brussels. I have been retrieving
files >from the collection since before they were moved to the
State Archives actually. Interestingly enough, while I was told
I had all the Trauring files in the archives, after reading a letter
in another file that referenced Naftali and Gittel Trauring living
in Antwerp, I contacted the archives again and asked them to
specifically look up that couple, and lo and behold they found
a file for them in the archives.

Looking at the Antwerp archives now, I see there is also a file
for them.

Let me share a bit I've learned about the two archives with
everyone. In theory, everything in the city archives (like
Antwerp) is supposed to be in the central State Archives also.
All cities were supposed to forward copies of each document
to the central archives. Obviously, being carried out by humans,
there are mistakes, but in theory the central archive files should
have everything in the city archives. I'll be testing this out
myself by ordering both files. I should add that the archivist in
the State Archives told me that they know there are gaps in
their files for the 19th century, and in particular many earlier
files in the central archives were destroyed in 1900 due to lack
of space. Thus, in particular when dealing with people who
lived in Belgium before 1900, the city files may contain
documents not found in the central archives.

The archivist also shared with m a very significant difference in
how the two archives operate. The reason the indexes of files
up until 1930 are online in the Antwerp archives is that the
workers in Antwerp are not allowed to do searches for files.
They posted the indexes up until 1930 so that researchers
could do the searches themselves. The State Archives which
hold the central archives does not have this restriction, so they
can do searches. In addition, their index system is on cards
and much larger, so it is considerably more difficult to scan -
there are millions of cards. At this point they are only planning
on putting indexes online up until 1880 (which probably
doesn't help most people on this list).

For those interested in contacting the State Archives, you can
e-mail archives.generales@arch.be, and make sure to include
in the subject 'with regard to Section 5' so it gets to the right
department.

As for Rivka's mention of German Registration documents,
does anybody know what documents these refer to and where
they might be? Rivka, are they documents >from during the
German occupation? What years are they from?

Philip Trauring
Modi'in, Israel