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The Collection and the Center for Louisiana Studies Release New Online Database of Mississippi Valley Documents in French Archives
Le Commerce que les Indiens du Mexique Font avec les Francois au Port de Missisipi by Frangois-Gerard Jollain, ca. 1720 (1952.3)
When he joined the department of historical research at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1905, American historian John Franklin Jameson (1859-1937) brought with him a spirit of nationalism and a belief that history had to rely upon primary documentation. Jameson recognized that documents in European archives were vital to an understanding of American history and spearheaded the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s inventorying of materials housed in Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Russia, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba.
When the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (now the Organization of American Historians) was established in 1907, its members, feeling that their interests did not receive the same level of attention as those of their colleagues studying the history of the Northeast, sought Jameson’s guidance in establishing a survey of French archival holdings related to the Mississippi Valley. Several scholars were dispatched to France to meticulously comb Parisian repositories for documentation covering the years 1681 to 1803. Their efforts came to an abrupt halt with the start of World War I, when the researchers were recalled.
Once hostilities ceased, the association revived the project—and soon realized that inconsistencies abounded and a tremendous amount of work would be required to make the findings useful to scholars. In 1922 historian Nancy Maria Miller Surrey (1874-1951)—author of the definitive Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime, 1699—1763
(Columbia University, 1916)—was selected to compile the findings into an inventory.
Surrey completed the monumental Calendar of Manuscripts in Paris Archives and Libraries Relating to the History of the Mississippi Valley to 1803 in 1926 and it was published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington with an introduction by Jameson. Surrey’s Calendar soon became an essential tool for researchers studying the history of the Mississippi Valley. Unfortunately, due to the small number of copies printed, it was not widely available. Even today, researchers have access to only two copies in all of France—one at the Bibliotheque National de France (Paris) and the other at the Archives nationales d’Outre-mer (Aix-en-Provence).
In 2005 Dr. Carl Brasseaux, then-head of the Center for Louisiana Studies (CLS) at the University of Louisiana— Lafayette, and Dr. Alfred Lemmon, director of the Williams Research Center at The Historic New Orleans Collection, realized that they shared a common dream of creating an online version of Surrey’s Calendar. Data entry began immediately at CLS, while Gilles-Antoine Langlois, of the Ecole nationale superieure d’architecture de Versailles and the Universite de Paris Est Creteil, was selected to examine additional French archives for Mississippi Valley materials. Through its cooperative exchange agreement with the Ecole nationale des chartes in Paris, The Collection selected Ecole student Pauline Charbonnier to design the website as part of her master’s program in technologies numeriques appliquees a 1’histoire (digital technolo-
gies applied to history). Charbonnier spent three months in New Orleans in the spring of 2011 and then continued her work in Paris, where she profited from the supervision of professors Florence Clavaud and Guillaume Hatt.
This fall The Collection and the Center for Louisiana Studies are proud to release “A Guide to French Louisiana Manuscripts: An Expanded and Revised Edition of the 1926 Surrey Calendar with Appendices.” Researchers may access this indispensable resource on The Collections website (www.hnoc.org) through the Research Tools link under Collections & Research, and on the CLS website (cls.louisiana.edu) through the Digital Resources link under Archives and Collections. The online, user-friendly database contains more than 27,000 documents; a bilingual introduction chronicling the evolution of the project; and the appendices “French Louisiana Materials in North America,” “Louisiana Materials in French Institutions, and “Online Resources.” The online format permits the inclusion of additional resources as they become available.
“A Guide to French Louisiana Manuscripts” is the result of the efforts of many individuals and serves as a tribute to the pioneering efforts of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and scholars who advocated for and conducted the original inventorying of Mississippi Valley documents in France.
—Alfred E. Lemmon, Gilles-Antoine Langlois, and Pauline Charbonnier
The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly 9