Transcribe NOLA Jazz Museum Colonial Records

The Louisiana Historical Center at the New Orleans Jazz Museum has digitized its collection of eighteenth-century French and Spanish colonial judicial records. You can consult this digital collection online at LAColonialDocs.org. You can also consult the original documents in the Louisiana Historical Center at the New Orleans Jazz Museum Reading Room.

The colonial records at the Jazz Museum are an extraordinary source of information about the people who lived in eighteenth-century New Orleans and the lower Mississippi Valley and about the institutions that shaped their lives. They were created when French and Spanish notaries recorded disputes about property and enslaved people. They give us details about enslavement, self-liberation and rebellion, kinship connections, pirate raids, colonial medicine, gambling parties, disputed inheritances, marital strife, and much more. Open-access transcriptions and translations of these documents make important steps toward caring for the words in these records and connecting them to a wider community. Learn more about the transcribathon project and about how you can get involved by visiting the project blog at nolajazztranscribathon.wordpress.com.

We would like to give credit to our contributors, so if you worked on the transcription or translation of any of these documents, please complete this form so that we can attribute you accordingly. Contributors to the collaborative transcription and translation of this document accept and agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License ("Public License"). This license lets others share, remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you (through your FromThePage user name) and license their new creations under the identical terms.

The documents that appear on this page are taken from a list of interesting records compiled by digitization experts during the 2010-2016 digitization project. Transcribathon co-coordinators worked together to feature all the documents from this list that had under twenty total transcribable/translatable images on this project site. Judicial Records of the French Superior Council (1714-1769) and the Spanish Judicial Records (1769-1803) appear courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum Historical Center and the Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project. www.lacolonialdocs.org.