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Title: Transforming an Eighteenth-Century Archive into a Twenty-First-Century Database: The Early California Population Project
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2007
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Abstract: The Early California Population Project is a database recently completed by research scholars at the Henry E. Huntington Library. The project is part of a wave of new databases that are opening up various regions of Early America for additional study; yet, unlike other databases, the Early California Population Project's records are overwhelmingly of Indians. The database offers new opportunities for historians and anthropologists interested in Indians, Catholic missions, Spanish soldiers and settlers, and family and community formation along the Spanish colonial frontier of North America between 1769 and 1850.Almost ten years in the making, the ECPP is an online computer database of all the information recorded in the baptism, marriage, and burial registers kept by missionaries and parish priests in Alta California between 1769 and 1850. As such, the ECPP provides access to information found in records now scattered across California that are too old and too fragile for most scholars to handle. Microfilm copies of the original registers exist in some archives, yet they are of variable quality. Understanding and interpreting these registers, written as they are in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish script, can demand rare skills and enormous effort. Lacking adequate staff or the resources to support genealogical or historical research, California libraries, archives, missions, and dioceses each year have been forced to turn away numerous individuals who are eager to study early California's Indian, Spanish, and Anglo-American inhabitants. Furthermore, because of barriers to access, scholars of colonial California and the Spanish and Mexican Southwest too often have not been able to incorporate the valuable information found in the sacramental records into their own research.
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Authors: Reid, Anne Marie; Hackel, Steven W.
Periodical (Full): History Compass
Issue: 3
Volume: 5
Pages: 1013-1025
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Methodology and Data Collection
Countries: United States