Cane River Historic Documents Project Collection

Scope and Content

The purpose of this document is to explain the contents of the three CDs of digital images presented to various organizations in Natchitoches as part of the Cane River Historic Documents Project. The first CD contains Succession Book 1, the second Succession Book 2 and the third four successions from a later date. Succession Books 1 and 2 are distinctive because they are the first successions to be recorded separately from the more general business of the notaire. They cover the period 1813 – 1820. Previously, successions were recorded in the Conveyance Books. Perhaps because of the increasing amount of paperwork involved as successions became larger, and that the books had to leave the notaire’s offices to record the property, by the 1810s successions were being recorded separately. The supporting documentation for some successions has also been preserved, starting a few years later, and this has recently been encapsulated by the Clerk of Court’s Office. From the thousands of examples that survived from the nineteenth century, I selected four to digitally photograph. These were ones with the closest links to the Cane River Historic Documents Project; Augustin Metoyer (1859), Dominique Metoyer (1840), Jean Baptiste Louis Metoyer (1837) and Marianne Doclas (c1827).

The images were taken over a period of three days at the end of April 2004. The results are variable, particularly near the beginning of Succession book 1, but for the most part very successful. This has proved to be a rapid technique for recording images, which were taken with a hand-held camera and saved as medium quality jpegs. More time was taken in the manipulation of the images, which was done in Photoshop, and mainly involved cropping, ‘skewing’ the images so they appeared to be shot straight on, and altering the levels and contrast. Legibility was my central concern rather than keeping the image looking like the original, which explains the variety of color tones in some. Some of them appear slightly out of focus – while in some cases they probably are, this is more often an effect of the ink bleeding into the paper. The succession books and the selections from later successions were processed in slightly different ways, with the succession books being more manipulated. Whilst all of these documents are encapsulated, the later succession papers are encapsulated in a shinier plastic that is more reflective than that used to cover the leaves of the succession books, which does affect the quality of the images.

While I have made every attempt to make sure that the pages remain in the order that they were taken, the peculiarities of copying files means that they will sometimes reorganize themselves alphabetically, though to a certain extent this is controlled by their organization into folders. However, the file names are straightforward and follow the page numbers of the volumes themselves, with the index to the volume labeled in Roman numerals, and the rest of the volume in numbers from 1. There may appear to be pages missing, or extra pages added – these have been checked and are the result of mistakes made by the clerk who wrote the document mislabeling pages. Ideally, I would have created a Word index to use with the digital images so users could go directly to the pages they are interested in, however, lack of time forbade me from this undertaking. The four selected successions are numbered simply in the order they appear in the bound volumes, as they do not have page numbers.

This project represents the first stage in the digitization of the important collections held at the Clerk of Courts Office. Hopefully these electronic documents will demonstrate how digitizing simultaneously addresses issues of access and preservation, both key concerns of the Cane River National Heritage Area.

Many thanks must go to the Cane River National Heritage Area for funding the Cane River Historic Documents Project. For this section of the project thanks must go to the Clerk of Court Louis Bernard for his support and especially to Linda Cockrell for her help and advice.   Fiona J. L. Handley, June 2004

Inventory

CD

1 Succession Book 1

2 Succession Book 2

3 Extra Successions