Natchez Trace Collection, provincial and territorial records, 1759-1813

Notes

"Named for the Amerindian trail and United States frontier road that ran between Nashville, Tennessee, and Natchez, Mississippi, the Natchez Trace Collection is a huge reservoir of largely untapped source material that illuminates the history of the lower Mississippi valley during the nineteenth century. The many constituent subcollections, large and small, focus on the states of Mississippi and Louisiana . . ."-P.115, Shearer Davis Bowman, "Inside the Natchez Trace Collection," ed. Katherine J. Adams and Lewis L. Gould (Baton Rouge, La. : Louisiana State University Press, c1999).

"The Provincial and Territorial Records of Natchez Trace Collection are mainly civil records of the various jurisdictions of colonial Louisiana, Mississippi, and adjacent areas from the middle of the eighteenth century through 1812, the year that Louisiana officially entered the Union as the eighteenth state. During that period Louisiana and part of Mississippi were governed as a colonial province or territory of France, Spain, and finally the westward-expanding United States. As the United States took control of these jurisdictions, both France and Spain removed their administrative records but left most of the civil records pertaining to property and personal matters of the regions inhabitants. . . . [cont. in next note field].

[cont.]"The role of the notary deserves special mention here. In both the French and Spanish regimes, property transfers, contracts, marriages, wills, and other such acts had to be executed, witnessed, and duly registered by a notary in order to qualify as authentic acts. The fact that local commandants, or in some cases local civil notaries, exercised both juridical and notarial functions meant that both types of records often were kept together"-Description at front of 1st film reel.

Includes family history material.

Text in English, French & Spanish.

Microreproduction of original records at the Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas.

Subjects

Locality Subjects

Library of Congress Subjects

Film/Digital Notes