Subject: Fw: [SOCAL] Huntington Library Database Tells the Stories of
100,000 Mission Indians
Maybe you folks already know all this, but considering Richard's Mexican
heritage, thought you might find it interesting.
Reclaiming a neglected part of California's past, historians Monday
unveiled an immense data bank that for the first time chronicles the lives
and
deaths of more than 100,000 Indians in the Spanish missions of the 18th and
19th centuries.
In an eight-year effort, researchers at the Huntington Library in San
Marino used handwritten records of baptisms, marriages and deaths at 21
Catholic missions and two other sites from between 1769 and 1850 and created
a cross-referenced computerized repository that is now open to public
access.
The Early California Population Project, its creators hope, will help
bring the state's Spanish colonial and Mexican eras from out of the long
shadows cast by the 13 English colonies on the East Coast.
"What we are trying to do here is to say these people have a history, and
it's not a history that can be caricatured," said the project's general
editor, historian Steven W. Hackel. "It's a history that emerges from a
deep
native past and a deep Spanish past and shows how the two came together for
better or worse."
Huntington officials say scholars and amateur genealogists will be able
to track, among other things, how many descendants of a Miwok Indian
survived into the era of U.S. statehood, how many people died in an
earthquake or a measles epidemic, how frequent intermarriage was between
Spanish soldiers and Indian women, or how many Indians worked in farming or
became skilled artisans.
The database does not offer judgments on the long debates about whether
the Franciscans forced Indians into the missions and treated them brutally
or
whether Father Junipero Serra, founder of the California mission system,
deserves to be, as he is now, just one step from sainthood in the Roman
Catholic Church.
However, it does document the Franciscans' obsessions with converting
Indians to Catholicism and its bans on polygamy and illegitimacy. And, death
by
death, it shows an extraordinarily high mortality rate as Indians became
exposed to European diseases such as measles, influenza and smallpox.
"People who think the missions were places of cultural genocide and
terrible population decline can look at this database, and they'll see that
people
came into the missions and died soon after," said Hackel, a history
professor
at Oregon State University. "People who want to see something else in the
missions can look here too. It also shows tremendous Indian persistence and
attempts to maintain their own communities within the missions."
The public can gain access to the database through an Internet link at
http://www.huntington.org . Conducting searches on the site can be
complicated at first because of the many choices involved.
The project, which cost $650,000, used records mainly taken from
microfilm of the originals. They overwhelmingly concern Indians in the
coastal regions from the San Diego to Marin County areas, perhaps as many as
half of the Indians within the current state borders. Some Spanish soldiers
and Mexican settlers are included through the turbulent times of Mexico's
independence from Spain in 1821 and California U.S. statehood in 1850.
There are some gaps in the documents as the missions declined, the
Franciscans were stripped of their authority and Indians revolted. After
the San Diego mission was burned down in an insurrection in 1775, the
priests
re-created the logs from memory, Hackel said.
Still, the Franciscans remained good record-keepers. They assigned
numbers to each baptism and carefully noted parents and godparents, village
of
origin, ethnic background and trades. As a result, many people can be traced
with astonishing specifics through life and, with computer links, their
progeny.
For example, a 2-day-old Indian boy, given the name Francisco, was
baptized Aug. 11, 1786, at Mission San Diego, the project shows. The
information links to his marriage at 18 to a woman named Maria Loreta, also
18 (a spinster by that era's customs) and her death five years later with no
children.
Francisco married again the next year to Antonina, who died childless 10
months later. He married a third time, to Thomasa (she was 13 and he was
26) and had a baby girl, Ynes, who died at 6 months. Francisco died April 4,
1817, apparently held in high regard by the Franciscans because he was given
a deathbed communion, not just an anointing.
Thomasa married twice more and had 10 more children, two of whom are
recorded as dying in infancy.
The causes of deaths in that clan were not given, but other records
reveal risks of Western life beyond disease. Some people died from bear and
snake attacks and others drowned in wells. The 1812 San Juan Capistrano
earthquake killed 39, all buried in the ruins of the mission church.
"It tells us one heck of a lot about the people of California before
1850," said Robert C. Ritchie, the Huntington's director of research. "It
has an
enormous amount of detail that sits below the big story we know: the
dying of so many native people along the coast."
Although surveys of smaller groups of missions were done in the past,
none pulled together populations from across what was known as Alta
California, scholars say. Plus, no other project on this topic was designed
for the average person, not just experts, to navigate.
"The goal is democratic and open access to records that previously were,
if not inaccessible, very, very hard to get," said Hackel, whose 2005 book,
"Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis," examined Indian-Spanish
relations in that period.
The raw records can be difficult to read, interpret and put into context,
he added. The project involved eye-straining work that took the equivalent
of between two and four full-time employees since 1999. Their job was to
take hundreds of thousands of bits of information from the microfilm of
sometimes damaged and illegible mission books and put them into
easy-to-read
computer formats.
Anne Marie Reid, the inputting team leader, recalled feeling ill
sometimes after long days staring at dark microfilm in Spanish and Latin
and
entering names and dates into computer logs.
But she said she also gained a feeling of fellowship with the Indians and
priests as she recognized their names in various references. "You come to
know these people," she said recently in her small workroom with consoles
and
screens.
In all, statistics were gleaned on an estimated 120,000 people, including
some with incomplete records and some mentioned just once as a parent.
Included are about 101,000 baptisms, 28,000 marriages and 71,000 burials at
all 21 missions and from the Los Angeles Plaza Church and the Santa Barbara
Presidio.
Partly because of the size, the project experienced some delays this
summer because of software glitches.
The Huntington has a few original and very valuable mission records,
including a page in Serra's very legible hand about three baptisms on
Dec. 1, 1783, at Mission San Luis Obispo. Missions and other Catholic
archives hold most of the surviving books but usually allow scholars to see
only microfilm copies, some made 50 years ago.
Among the institutions lending microfilm for the project were the Santa
Barbara Mission Archive-Library, the archdioceses of San Francisco and
Los Angeles, and Santa Clara University. John R. Johnson, curator of
anthropology for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and Randall
Milliken, a Davis-based anthropologist and mission expert, helped with
planning.
The largest financial support for the project came from the National
Endowment for the Humanities ($294,000), the California State Library
($163,000) and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation
($110,000).
The Dan Murphy Foundation and the Giles W. and Elise G. Mead Foundation
were among other donors.
Anthony Morales, tribal chair and chief of the Gabrieleno/Tongva Band of
Mission Indians of San Gabriel, said he thought the project would "really
catch the interest of all kinds of people like educators and researchers and
just average folks who are interested in their families."
Some people, he said, will search for evidence of brutality in the
mission system such as forced conversions and labor, while others will look
for a more positive picture, such as "what did happen after my
great-great-grandmother got converted and baptized."
Robert Senkewicz, a Santa Clara University historian who is an expert on
early California, said the accessibility of the database is its "great
virtue."
"It will make genealogists feel like they died and went to heaven," he
said.
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