Contemporary Syria, characterised by political upheaval, questions the idea of an archive as a physical repository of documents and a set of institutional practices safeguarding the past and present. Since 2011, Syrian state archives and legal documents have fallen victim to evacuation, destruction and plundering. As some edifices containing these archives and their documents are destroyed, others are subject to an upsurge of new documents produced by Syrian state authorities in response to the return and ‘reintegration’ of Syrians from displacement. Simultaneously, Syrians in the diaspora have been saving and retrieving copies of mundane legal papers originally stored in state archives as these documents are official proof of legal identities, education and relations to kin and land. These papers are fundamental in any migratory project, from displacement in Lebanon to asylum in Europe, where they are needed for numerous procedures. These documents are also central in preserving a connection to family members in Syria and in the diaspora becoming a form of care from a distance. Thus, the fragmentation and remaking of these archives reconfigure their usage and archival logic mutating the significance of these archives too. As old state archives are now dislocated and scattered in private, domestic archives, these documents articulate different histories and forms of knowledge about the Syrian predicament. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork amongst Syrian families in Lebanon and Germany (2014-2022), this paper examines how families’ mundane documents are ingrained in the complex transnational circuits of people, objects, memories and relations within Syrian families. Indeed, families’ archival practices can be re-read as a form of care aiming at sustaining life worth, personhood and relatedness in times of war and migration. While these documents become a mode of care, their journey across borders bears traces of the violent and ordinary events characterizing wartime in Syria and the discriminatory features of bureaucracy in Europe. The scattering and remaking of these archives sheds a light on the entanglement of moral economies with legal and bureaucratic regimes to reconstruct different histories of wartime Syria and a different political history of the archive partly disarticulated from state and (post)colonial forms of knowledge-power.