Although the government had at an early time legislated on the issue of Archives, after Geffrard the institution was never granted the attention it deserved.
[3] While the new location addressed the problem of insufficient space, it did not improve upon the poor conservation conditions which had resulted in the loss of a large number of documents.
[4] In 1983, Jean Wilfrid Bertrand was named the director general of the ANH; he continues to hold the position to the present day.
[5] Prior to the earthquake of 2010, the director, Jean Wilfrid Bertrand, has said that items in the archive were already damaged, destroyed or poorly housed.
[10] The Managing director of ANH in 2018 observed that 3 million Haitian citizens do not have their birth certificates and the purpose of this project is to help them prove their identity; as Jean Wilfrid Bertrand has remarked, one quarter of the population does not officially exist because they are not registered.
ANH Director Jean Wilfrid Bertrand has commented: “The Caribbean’s colonial past has weighed and still weighs heavily on the region’s future.”[4] While the ANH possesses some holdings from their colonial era, such as registers of vital statistics, many more historical records central to Haiti's documentary heritage are held by the national archives of France and their trading partners, such as Spain and Britain.
For example, no original or official copies of Haiti's Declaration of Independence were known to exist until 2010, when one was located by Julia Gaffield - a doctoral student at the time - in The National Archives (UK).