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 other words, the Catholicism of the 18th Century saved the amateur genealogists of the 21st.
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