Researchers interested in exploring multiple aspects of the history of free people of color in Louisiana can now do so in a recently released, free online resource available at
http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/fpoc/. “Free People of Color in Louisiana: Revealing an Unknown Past,” is a collaborative digital project funded by the National Endowment for the
Humanities that brings together and provides access to over 30,000 pages of family and personal papers, business records, and public documents from the LSU Libraries’ Special Collections, the Louisiana State Museum Historical Center, the Historic New Orleans Collection, Tulane University’s Louisiana Research Collection, and New Orleans Public Library. From the website:
Relatively few collections of papers from free families of color survive in archives in Louisiana, nor are they numerous in archives elsewhere in the United States. The most extensive collections of family papers for free people of color held by Louisiana repositories are, in fact, split across institutions. Digitizing these records will allow us to bring together divided collections and scattered documents, making these materials accessible in one place for the use of historians, genealogists, students, teachers, and the general public.
Among many features, the site includes an
annotated list of the collections selected for digitization.
