Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals

The city of New Orleans is home to extensive notarial and judicial manuscript records that document, often in minute detail, economic and legal activity in the Lower Mississippi Valley during the French (1699–1768) and Spanish (1769–1803) colonial periods. The legal custodianship of New Orleans's largest colonial period archive has changed hands quite often over the last three centuries. This article recounts the peregrinations of these documents and their insertion into the collections of the Notarial Archives Division of the Orleans Parish Clerk of Civil Court's office (NONA) and Old U.S. Mint of the Louisiana State Museum (LSM).

Recent decades have witnessed steady and significant historiographical interest in the history of early modern French Louisiana. The field presently boasts a dynamic set of analysts actively investigating primary sources across America and France. In addition, many French Louisiana sources and historical issues remain unexplored, thereby suggesting that the historiography of early modern French Louisiana will continue to grow substantially. While numerous inventories of Louisiana sources have been published, few have specifically focused their attention on early modern French Louisiana documents. Several of these guides contain information that is no longer valid by pointing to sources that have been moved or have subsequently disappeared. In addition, many sources are being made more readily available through digitization and the creation of online databases. This article provides much-needed guidance on identifying and using French Louisiana sources. It lists the sources available and investigates their nature, details of access, state of preservation, as well as their state of digitization. It also suggests potential uses and interpretations that might be gleaned from such source material.

Heloise Hulse Cruzat (1862–1931) and Laura Louise Porteous (1875–1952) worked in New Orleans during the first half of the twentieth century to transcribe, translate, and index the Louisiana Historical Society's (LHS) vast collection of French and Spanish colonial judicial records. This essay places the body of their work for the LHS in national perspective, describes their lives in the context of evolving roles for women in New Orleans cultural institutions, and considers the significance of their work for past and future scholars.1

Heloise Hulse Cruzat and Laura Louise Porteous spent decades of their lives feeding the quill and ink symbols scratched onto eighteenth century Spanish and French colonial judicial records to their typewriters. Cruzat worked for the Louisiana Historical Society (LHS) from 1917 to 1931 as a translator of French colonial records, and Porteous worked from 1920 to 1948 on the Spanish records. Translation was a central part of the process that transformed the colonial notarial and judicial records into historical documents. In this case study, one Spanish judicial record is compared to Porteous's corresponding English “Index” entry. Examining such work closely allows us to spotlight what Porteous chose to omit; moreover, her “Index” entry becomes a tool for reading between the lines of one Spanish colonial judicial record.

The Louisiana State Museum's Louisiana Historical Center holds approximately thirty thousand French Superior Council and Spanish Judicial Colonial Documents. These documents contain quotidian details about life in the colonial Atlantic, showcase the judicial and legal structure of the French and Spanish colonies, and place the colonies within the context of developing global political and economic structures. The only existing indexes of the Colonial Documents were created in the first half of the twentieth century and are incomplete. This is in large part a consequence of cultural, social and political constructions that informed the processes of conservators, translators and scholars. However, an ongoing, collaborative initiative entitled The Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project (LCDDP) aims to preserve the hundreds of thousands of individual pages from these records to culminate in an online, newly-indexed, comprehensive database that will be accessible internationally and free of charge. This article demonstrates how the LCDDP, in addition to digitally preserving manuscripts, provides solutions to technical and historiographical issues presented by current indexes as well as physical limitations of the collection. This article also examines the LCDDP for its limitations vis à vis access and conservation as well as its relationship to new research based on current trends and theories in Atlantic World research.