Results of Phase I (2003-2006)
After almost three years of intensive work, our joint teams have captured more than 150,000 images, comprising more than 750,000 ecclesiastical records of African and African descended individuals from Brazil, Cuba, and Spanish Florida.
The diverse types of documents preserved include, among others, 16th century black baptisms, marriages, and burials from the Cathedral of Havana, 18th century black wills and testaments from the Diocese of Nova Iguaçu, Brazil, 18th and 19th century black brotherhood records from Brazil and Cuba, and 19th century burials of unbaptized "Asiaticos" in Matanzas, Cuba. Team members have also digitized related collections dealing with Africans and African descended people in the provincial archives in Matanzas and Guantanamo, Cuba.
All ecclesiastical records from Cuba are available at: http://lib11.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/esss.pl
Selected Brazilian materials are available at: http://www.historia.uff.br/curias/modules/tinyd0/index.php?id=1
Project collaborators have also trained undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students in paleography and basic preservation techniques. These student assistants inventoried parish holdings, cleaned and preserved precious parish registers, digitized images, transcribed selected documents, and produced original research from the records they are helping to save. The Brazil team also produced a CDROM on the history and holdings of the churches of the Diocese of Nova Iguaçu and each project maintains a website linked to the others.
Team members working in Brazil and Cuba have created original indexes of the black ecclesiastical records in each of the churches in which they have worked as well as for those in which they plan to work. We have provided copies of the indexes and CDROMs of all the digitalized records to our host churches.
Vanderbilt University's Heard Library Digital and Unique Collections has stored all the data on multiple mirrored servers and mounted a web-based interface and finding guide of the Cuban materials. Team members are constructing databases based on the Cuban records and have presented preliminary findings and reports on this project at a variety of domestic and international venues including Brazil, Cuba, Morocco, the United States, and Canada. Graduate students in the United States, Canada, and Brazil are producing masters theses and doctoral dissertations using this data.
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