A fundamental chapter in the activity of any brotherhood or public or private institution is the custody and conservation of the documentation that it produces and receives, related to its associative life and its members or purposes; a task that corresponds to the Secretariat of the same.
The fire of July 1936, largely destroyed the previous documentation.
In the case of the Pontificia, Real e Ilustre Hermandad Matriz de Ntra. Sra. del Rocío, its archive is organized in two main sections and spaces:
The administrative archive, created in 2011, in which the most recent correspondence received and produced is kept in the furniture installed in the office of the Secretary, usually from the last four years, which has a parallel file in the treasury of the Brotherhood Matriz, guarded by the Treasury area itself.
And the historical archive, to which both administrative archives are incorporated, which holds all the relevant information of the brotherhood that exceeds four years of antiquity.
In this regard, it should be noted that, since the historical archive of the Hermandad Matriz was destroyed in the arson attack on the parish archives of Almonte in July 1936, the documentation that is preserved is basically, with some exceptions, subsequent to this date. It is worth mentioning the Minute Books section, where the associative life of this institution is recorded.
The Infante-Galán Fund and the Philatelic Fund Rev. Antonio Bueno Montes gloss the enormous wealth of material in the custody of the Hermandad Matriz
A different section of the historical archive is constituted by the Infante-Galán fund, documentary, bibliographic, newspaper and graphic collection, gathered by the historian Juan Infante Galán, q.e.p.d., donated to the Matriz Brotherhood by his sister Isabel Infante Galán, at his death in 2000. A very rich collection that has come, in part, to make up for the mutilation suffered in the archives of the Hermandad Matriz collection, due to the richness and variety of its contents. It is a collection in which the Hermandad Matriz has been working for its classification, arrangement and cataloguing, since then, under the direction of Professor Antonio López Gutiérrez, professor of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, of the Area of Historiographic Sciences and Techniques, who has recently resigned from this responsibility.
Under the custody of the Secretariat of the Hermandad Matriz, are, likewise, the bibliographic, newspaper and graphic collections of the same, and since February 2018, the Philatelic Fund Rev. Antonio Bueno Montes, q.e.p.d.; a collection of national and international Marian stamps, recently donated to the Hermandad Matriz by the Bueno-Montes family, in fulfillment of the wishes of this great rociero priest.
