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St. John the Baptish Parish Louisiana |
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The Roman Catholic Church was the major record keeper for most of Louisiana for over 100 years. In the early days, even non-Catholics were recorded.
The Roman Catholic Church has had a presence in Louisiana since before the founding of New Orleans by the French in 1718. The Diocese of New Orleans (Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas) was created on April 25, 1793 and originally encompassed the entire Louisiana Purchase, from the Gulf of Mexico to British North America, as well as the Florida peninsula and the Gulf Coast. The date of its establishment makes it the second-oldest diocese in the present-day United States: the Diocese of Baltimore was established on November 6, 1789.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans currently encompasses eight civil parishes in the New Orleans metropolitan area:
Jefferson, Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany, and Washington.
~Extracted from Wikipedia, 8/10/2019
Since 1954, records have been microfilmed for disaster recovery purposes. With the advances in technology, scanned images have become more widely used as this type of media becomes more standardized in .tif, .jpeg and .pdf formats. Through the conservation program, the registers are unbound, de-acidified, encapsulated in mylar and rebound. Ten years ago, the archdiocese had some of its records scanned into individual .tif images. Among these images are the registers of the slaves and free people of color from St. Louis Cathedral. These images have now been migrated to .pdf format in order to place them online for all researchers. In 2012, in order to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Louisiana’s statehood, the archdiocese began placing online the registers dating from 1718 to 1812. There are 43 registers from the French and Spanish colonial period as well as the American territorial period.
~https://archives.arch-no.org/sfpc (accessed 8/10/2019)
Digitized Sacramental Records in the New Orleans Archives
The listing of digitized records includes:
St. John The Baptist, Edgard, Baptism 1772-1791, 1792-1818 Part 1, 1792-1818 Part 2, 1796-1817
St. John The Baptist, Edgard, Marriage 1772-1807, 1807-1818 Part 1, 1807-1818 Part 2
St. John The Baptist, Edgard, Funeral 1772-1815
The Diocese of Baton Rouge was established in July, 1961, although Catholic Churches in the geographical area date back to the 1700s.
The Diocese encompasses 12 civil parishes: Ascension, Assumption, East & West Baton Rouge, Iberville, Livingston, Pointe Coupee, St. James, Tangipahoa & West Feliciana.
Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge Archives
The records start in 1707 and contain baptisms, marriages and burials. If you are interested in researching the Diocese of Baton Rouge Catholic Church Records published volumes,
please visit the Main Branch of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library System.
Not in Baton Rouge? Check with your local library. The published volumes for both Baton Rouge and New Orleans areas are available at libraries across the country.
