FAMILY FILES

Historical information on the Palestine refugees is stored in some 684,136 family files. These files contain information on registration dating in many cases back to 1948, supported by copies of birth, marriage and death certificates, records of property ownership or leases, taxation receipts, employment records and passport and travel documents. In total there are an estimated 25 million critical documents which constitute an invaluable archive of the lives of a major sector of the Palestinian population at the time they became refugees. The Agency wishes to store this information electronically in order to link it with the registration and socio-economic databases in the Unified Registration System, to make it more accessible and to preserve it for the future.