Maurice Jean Alfred Alphonse Yans (1914—1983) was a Belgian historian and archivist, conservator at the State Archive of Liège.
In 1936 he obtained a doctorate, passed the exam for candidate archivists in the Belgian State Archives, and won a travel bursary which he used to study in Paris, following courses at the École Nationale des Chartes, the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, École normale supérieure and the École pratique des hautes études.
[1] In 1938 he began to work in the State Archives in Liège, which were hit by a V-2 rocket on 24 December 1944 and caught fire.
Yans was among the salvage workers who dug through the ruins in freezing weather to see what could be saved.
Together with Léon Halkin, he founded and directed an École pratique d'histoire et d'archéologie régionales in Liège.