The Archdiocese of New Orleans says it will unveil Tuesday a new online database containing records of baptisms, marriages and deaths in colonial New Orleans — including those of African slaves, who until now have been nearly invisible to genealogical research.
Although the church released few details on the database, which is scheduled to go live Tuesday, the church’s brief description outlines a powerful new tool for scholars and ordinary genealogists, particularly for those searching for slave ancestors, a New Orleans historian said.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond and archivist Emilie Leumas are scheduled to announce Tuesday that the French and Spanish records, set down in florid script and dating from the founding of New Orleans in 1718, are moving online and will be available to anyone, anywhere.
The church scheduled a demonstration of the database for Tuesday at 12:30 p.m., but it released few details, including how it will be searchable.
“This is a cache of records unlike any other,” said Emily Clark, a Tulane University historian of early New Orleans who, as a credentialed scholar, has made extensive use of the church records stored at the old Ursuline Convent in the French Quarter.
Until New Orleans became an American city in 1803, the state-sponsored Catholic Church functioned in some respects as an arm of the government, first under the French, then the Spanish.
One of those functions was record-keeping. In colonial New Orleans, there were no separate civil offices recording births, deaths and marriages like modern offices of vital statistics, said Clark. Those events were recorded in church ledgers. And so it is church ledgers that provide researchers the keyhole through which to view the social and cultural mores of the colony, she said.
For years, many of the names in those records have been indexed, and the life-cycle events they describe summarized in two dozen or so massive volumes organized by surname.
Those volumes, well-known to genealogists and available at the New Orleans Public Library, can tell a researcher where and when a certain white planter or merchant was baptized, married or buried in 19th century New Orleans.
But without surnames, African slaves and some free people of color are invisible in those ledgers, Clark said.
The records of their life-cycle events are only in the original sacramental documents, which are just now coming into the light in the new online database.
Moreover, Clark said, the original sacramental records sometimes contain important marginal notations that do not make it into the bound summaries. Those apparently will be visible in the database as well.
“This means ordinary people all over the country with ancestors in early Louisiana will be able to push back much further, and that’s important, not only for Louisiana, but nationally,” Clark said.
The church records open a window into the slave experience for reasons peculiar to New Orleans’ European and Catholic roots, Clark said.
Elsewhere in colonial America, slaveholders were predominantly Congregationalist in the Northeast or members of the Church of England along the Atlantic seaboard. Neither denomination devoted itself to evangelizing African slaves, thus depriving history of church-based records of individuals’ births, deaths and sometimes their marriages, Clark said.
In those regions, evidence of the lives of individual slaves “is really a matter of chance. If somebody decided to record that information on their own, we might have it. But it’s very rare,” she said.
By contrast, French colonial law required the baptism of slaves, she said. And by convention, many French slaveholders raised their slaves in the faith, producing more church records as individuals moved through the major events of life.
In many New Orleans cases, that even included marriage, which was permitted and in some cases even encouraged, she said.
Because slaves usually appeared only by their first names — Marie and Jean-Baptiste are the most common of the period, Clark said — it will take additional detective work to identify individuals as a researcher’s potential forbear, Clark said. But in many cases, clues will be there, or may be available from other sources.
Baptismal certificates often name a child’s mother. And civil notarial records describing the purchase or sale of slaves name individuals and owners, sometimes providing a jumping-off point for searching church records, she said.
Clark, who is the Clement Chambers Benenson professor of American colonial history at Tulane, has written extensively about the history of the Ursuline nuns in New Orleans and the role of African-Americans in the early city’s Catholic community.
From her own familiarity with the church records, Clark said it might be possible for a wide audience to assemble bits of evidence fleshing out slave families, god-parenting customs and other social and cultural customs in early New Orleans.
“It’s a wonderful resource,” Clark said. “I’m thrilled it’s going to be available to the man on the street.”
Bruce Nolan can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org or 504.826.3344