Catholic records of slave baptisms in colonial New Orleans go online
By Bruce Nolan, The Times-Picayune
On Sunday, the 6th of May, 1798, an enslaved New Orleans woman named only Manon, owned by Mr. LeBlanc, presented her 2-year-old child, Antoine Joseph, at St. Louis Cathedral on the Plaza de Armas to be baptized at the hands of Father Luis Quintanilla, a Capuchin friar there.
Manon was probably accompanied by her owner, as was the custom of the day, according to Emilie Leumas, an expert on the era and the keeper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ sacramental records.
In racially complex, laissez-faire New Orleans, where categories of race were faithfully noted then sometimes dismissed, Quintanilla noted the pertinent details. Manon was a mulatto, or mixed-race woman, and the baby’s father was officially unrecognized but apparently white, as the baby is described with the Spanish term “quarteroon,” which means three-fourths white.
The record of that event has always been preserved in the rich archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. But it has never been easily accessible.
But Tuesday, the 1798 baptism of Antoine Joseph, with thousands of similar baptismal records from colonial New Orleans, were posted on the Internet as a new tool for genealogists everywhere.
“Now people can sit in their slippers at 11 o’clock at night and read away,” said Leumas, the archdiocese’s archivist.
Significantly, the first batch of five registers to go online are the baptismal records of slaves and free persons of color. Almost all of them are bereft of family names, and before now, were largely beyond the reach of most genealogical researchers, church officials said.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond said the online registers, launched on the first day of Black History Month, demonstrate to New Orleanians “that we very much appreciate (African-Americans’) integral part in our history. This is a way of giving thanks for their presence, their faith and the many ways they have built up our community.”
Aymond acknowledged the records will also draw renewed attention to the uncomfortable fact that in colonial New Orleans the church and its religious orders were often slave-holders. The publication is offered with an apology, he said.
“I apologize in the name of the church because we allowed some of these things to continue,” Aymond said. “This is sinful. Racism is sinful.”
The first batch in the database records baptisms beginning in 1777 at the cathedral, Leumas said.
Rendered in Spanish, sometimes in iron gall ink that has deteriorated badly, they often take a practiced and patient eye and a knowledge of local conventions to fully decode, Leumas said. By themselves, they are not sufficient to find a target individual.
But paired with civil data like real estate or census records, they can help a researcher close in on a distant relative, Leumas said.
Where slave owners or free people of color have surnames, a single page in the 212-year-old index from 1798 reads like a modern New Orleans directory. The names are Fortier, Montreuil, LeBlanc and Trudeau.
The original records, once housed in the Old Ursuline Convent, now are stored in environment-controlled vaults at archdiocesan headquarters on Walmsley Avenue, said Leumas, who took over as archivist in 2005.
In her five-year tenure, Leumas has made the archives increasingly open to amateur genealogists, but the online database represents a major leap.
Although scanning material to the Internet is common with high-speed, sheet-fed technologies that have been available for years, Leumas said those techniques are not applicable when dealing with fragile antique documents.
She said transferring the records online was expensive and labor-intensive. The project entailed disassembling the old registers, delicately scanning each page, resealing each leaf in Mylar and reassembling the books.
“It’s a question of resources. This is expensive work,” she said.
Future postings will be done with a techonology that transfers images from pages that have already been microfilmed, Leumas said.
She said the indexed records online now mostly contain only people who, because of their enslavement or low social status as free persons of color, were known only by first names.
Similar records of French and Spanish families with surnames were indexed, and the pertinent data on their births, marriages and deaths were summarized years ago in widely available genealogy references.
As a state-sponsored church, the Catholic church enjoyed special status in New Orleans in 1798, the year of Antoine Joseph’s baptism, Leumas said.
Colonial law required that he be baptized along with the thousands of other slaves, thus producing a rich layer of documentation describing the social, sexual and cultural mores of the time.
Similarly, church records at the time also recorded slave funerals and permitted slave marriages, providing documentary evidence of human lives often overlooked in other American communities, Leumas said.
Aymond suggested the database finally affords a measure of public dignity for lives lived in crushing anonymity. Bringing the name of a long lost person into public view “is a way of getting in touch with that person’s spirit,” he said.
In Antoine Joseph’s case, the godparents were there: Marie Joseph and Antonio, neither with a family name. Still attentive to the complex categories of race and color, Quintanilla noted that the baby’s godfather was “metis” -- another mixed-race classification, perhaps suggesting American Indian blood, according to Leumas.
By the end of 2012, the archdiocese hopes to go both forward and backward in time, posting all of its sacramental records -- baptisms, marriages, funerals and other life cycle events -- from the founding of the city in 1718 to the date of Louisiana’s admittance to the union in 1812, Leumas said.
“None of it is easy. It’s painstaking. But for a researcher who knows how to do it, and who continues to do it, this is a gold mine for them,” she said.
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