Archives
The importance with which burial within the consecrated ground of the cemetery was held is seen in a 1738 case involving a petition to the Superior Council, in which an enslaved girl was to have her body exhumed and reburied at the site. In it, Father Mathias reported that Monsieur Loquet de la Pommeraye, the Treasurer General, had his slaves bury “the body of a negress of twelve or thirteen years, out of the cemetery, contrary to the ordinance of the King in the Code Noir, by which His Majesty wills and intends that the masters be obliged to inter the bodies of their baptized slaves in the cemetery, with the ceremonies of the Church.” The girl was exhumed and reburied in the cemetery, and Loquet de la Pommeraye was fined of thirty livres to be applied to fencing the cemetery (Cabildo Archives 293; transcription of documents available at http://www.mylhcv.com/colonial-treasurer-general-of-new-orleans-sued-by-vicar-general from Louisiana Historical Quarterly, October 1920).
A number of ‘Yndios/Indios’ appear in Spanish period records, including both free individuals, like a man recorded as “Mingo Houppas”, an apparent chief of the Choctaw (identified in the burial record as the “Gran Hefe o Cacique de los Salvages Chactas”), who died at Charity Hospital on 30 August, 1775 after receiving the rites of baptism, and ones enslaved. The enslavement of Native Americans had ostensibly been outlawed in Spanish colonies, but the practice continued in Louisiana long after it became a Spanish colony.
Some of the Colonial-era Sacramental Records for New Orleans were destroyed in the 1788 fire, but some funeral records have been preserved in the Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Beginning in 1772, during the Spanish era, burials of whites (or ‘blancos’) were enumerated in separate registers from people of color (“gente de color”), who are broken down into a number of different categories, including “negro”, “mulato”, “grifo”, “quateron”, and “Yndio”. Those of both ‘slave’ (“esclavo”) and free (“libre”) status are enumerated in the registers for people of color. The sacramental records are well-known as a source of genealogical information, but, because so many of the people of color in them are listed without clear surnames, they have often received somewhat less attention from researchers.