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| Part of the catalog for the French Superior Council holdings |
Artdaily.org posted a neat article
about the archives held by the Louisiana
Historical Center
(New Orleans
A marathon project is under way in New Orleans
to digitize thousands of time-worn 18th-century French and Spanish legal papers
that historians say give the first historical accounts of slaves and free
blacks in North America . Yellowed page by
yellowed page, archivists are scanning the 220,000 manuscript pages from the French Superior Council and Spanish Judiciary between 1714
and 1803 in an effort to digitize, preserve, translate and index Louisiana's
colonial past and in the process help re-write American history ... It's at the
heart of a wave of research tracing American roots beyond the English colonies
and into Spain , France and Africa .
... It wasn't until the early 1900s for serious preservation and
translation work to begin. The Works Progress Administration then patched up
pages with tape (chemical from the tape is now eating at pages) and wrote
English synopses. But past archivists and translators also buried important
documents. Entire chunks — most importantly documents dealing with slave trials
and women — were conspicuously left out of consideration. In one memorable
case, archivists censored a case about a soldier accused of bestiality.
It
is always neat to see articles on non-genealogical blogs and sites regarding
material that is relevant to the research we do! I like to think that inside each historian
there is a budding genealogist!
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