For most people researching Black and Creole family history in Louisiana, 1865 is a wall. Before emancipation, records become sparse, names disappear, and the paper trail that genealogists depend on simply stops. The question of who your family was before the Civil War — where they lived, what they were called, who baptized them — has been effectively unanswerable for generations of researchers.
The Louisiana Heritage Platform is an attempt to break that wall.
Three archives, one platform
The platform links three independent historical archives spanning 1719 to 1880, covering notarial acts, Catholic sacramental records, and US Census data for Louisiana. Together they contain over 1.4 million records — and more importantly, they overlap in ways that allow individuals to be traced across them.
| Archive | Years | Records | Content |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hall Archive | 1719–1820 | 104,729 | Notarial acts, sales, manumissions, inventories |
| Hebert Archive | 1720–1865 | 390,687 | Catholic parish sacramental records — baptisms, marriages, burials |
| 1880 US Census | 1880 | 935,068 | Louisiana households — race, age, occupation, birthplace, parish |
| Total | 1719–1880 | 1,430,484 |
Cross-archive linking
The core of the platform isn’t the records themselves — it’s the links between them. A person baptized in the Hebert archive in 1830 might appear in a Hall notarial act in 1818 and in the 1880 Census as an elderly head of household. Connecting those three appearances requires matching across different record types, spelling variations, parish geographies, and time gaps measured in decades.
The linking algorithm scores candidate matches on name similarity (using Soundex and given name comparison), parish geography, and year proximity. Matches scoring 90% or above are flagged as strong; 65–89% as possible. The Hall ↔ Hebert linker is live in production with 6,176 confirmed links. The Hebert ↔ Census linker has produced 1,515 links in development and is being tuned before a production push.
Who it’s for
The platform is designed for genealogical researchers working on Black and Creole family history in Louisiana — specifically those whose research hits the pre-emancipation wall. The Hebert archive’s Catholic sacramental records are particularly valuable because they documented enslaved individuals and free people of color by name, decades before emancipation-era records begin.
The site is currently password-protected while development continues. If you’re a researcher interested in access, send an email to garland.joseph@gmail.com.
Visit the Louisiana Heritage Platform at swla-records.garlandjoseph.org
Open SWLA Records →Genealogy Louisiana Black history Creole 1880 Census Hebert Archive Hall Archive