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The aim of the paper is to sketch the beginnings of the Wesselényi family's career and the history of the family archives in brief. The Wesselényi family originating from Nógrád county settled in Transylvania after 1556, and from the end of the 16th century have raised from the lesser nobility to the Transylvanian aristocrats. The ascension, the growth of the authority and wealth of the family from the 16th century onwards naturally brought about the increase of the amount of the archival documents referring to the family. In what follows, we detail the inventory and status of the archives of the family from Jibou, Hodod, Dragu and Cluj according to the 1949 register of the Transylvanian National Museum Archives, an institution that used to function within the Transylvanian Museum Society (Cluj-Napoca). From a thematic point of view the documents of these archives do not differ from the other family archives: besides the documents related to the right of possession, the correspondence of the members of the family, the documents related to their office and kept by them, records of economic nature and those related to the management of the possessions were preserved in a higher number. From the period before 1542 about 300 charters have been preserved in original or in copies, and in their turn these stored the texts of about 500 documents. The archives are hardly unknown to the scholarly world, but only a few explored systematically the materials referring to the period before the 17th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]