Database helps trace the early California settlement

01.09.2006
For decades, researchers looking into the history of the California mission system and its residents from 1769 to 1850 had to comb through detailed records using eye-aching rolls of aged microfilm in multiple locations throughout the state.

There was no way to search the complete body of data at once, nor was the data available in one place for tracking historical patterns or a piece of needed information in a reasonable amount of time.

But now, the Early California Population Project (ECPP) has brought all of the information together to provide researchers with a vast body of fully searchable information in one data repository. During the eight-year project, the huge database was developed by manually entering information from microfilmed images of old Spanish texts originally hand-written in ledgers and on papers from the state's 21 missions.

The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, a research and educational institution in San Marino, Calif., unveiled the ECPP database earlier this month (http://www.huntington.org/Information/news/ECPP.pdf). The database provides insights into the lives of some 110,000 Native American, Mexican, Spanish and other settlers who lived in the missions from 1769 to 1850.

Steven Hackel, a fellow at the Huntington Library and an associate professor of history at Oregon State University, said the 4.5GB database is a record of all baptisms, marriages and burials of residents in California's 21 Franciscan missions during the colonial period. All of the meticulous records were originally written by hand by the Franciscans in ledgers and on papers that were stored in each of the missions along the California coast.

The personal data includes a variety of details for researchers, including the villages where the residents came from, their native names and information on their spouses and children, he said.