Louisiana Networks is a collection that explores the experiences of ordinary people, especially women, living in lower French Louisiana during the eighteenth century through primary sources and oral traditions. Using the framework of networks, this site draws connections between people and their family, kin, and community.
Currently, the site includes a database that outlines the demographic information of individuals along with their households illustrating the diversity of experiences across the colony. Future phases will include maps, visualizations, and exhibits that illuminate trends and narratives about the lives of people in the settlements of Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Mobile, and New Orleans. The organizational structure of this site centers on people and not documents to humanize these populations’ lived experiences for modern audiences by indicating community connections and individual stories while tracking their life course in an open-source platform. At the same time, this method highlights the erasure of marginalized groups such as enslaved people and women. The creation of reports and sacramental records by colonial officials such as priests contributed to the imperial project by attaching status to documentation. A person’s race and even class status often determined how much or little information an official would document. This trend is especially true in sacramental records that document forced and coerced relationships that people in the colony had with individuals of different racial and ethnic groups.
HISTORY
Officials in France expected Louisiana’s families to represent French culture through practices such as Catholicism and western patriarchal kinship structures. Officials often linked the behavior of colonial subjects to the empire’s ability to successfully defend and maintain its borders and support the treasury from afar. French officials expected residents in New Orleans and Mobile to marry as Catholics and produce French-speaking children who would work to contribute to France’s prosperity. From the perspectives of officials and administrators, every subject regardless of class, race, and gender could decide to live up to these standards of an ideal family in Louisiana. Leaders in the colony, however, frequently reported that people living in and near the ports made decisions regarding their living and family arrangements based on self-interests. A first glance at the behavior of colonial populations seems to confirm administrators’ claims of uncontrollable residents. Considering these conflicting images of officials’ utopian society and colonial leaders’ descriptions of an immoral and uncontrollable colonial population, research on the behavior of individuals helps decipher the realities of the colony.
For more information: Howard, Jacquelyne Thoni. “Families on the Borderlands: Marriage and Kinship in Lower French Louisiana, 1700-1795.” Order No. 13877654, Fordham University, 2019. http://libproxy.tulane.edu:2048/login.
OUR COMMUNITY
Jacquelyne Thoni Howard, Ph.D.
Director Newcomb Institute of Tulane University
Tulane University
Development Team
Liv Tanaka-Kekai – Research Assistant, Site Builder
Ainsley Anderson – Research Assistant
Emily O’Connell – Digital Research Intern
Lucien Mensah – Digital Research Intern
Renee Trepagnier – Research Assistant
Maya Lavinier – Research Assistant
The following institutions provided financial support for this research through grants and fellowships: Newcomb Institute at Tulane University, New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, and Fordham University’s History Department.