The information in this database has been drawn from the Calendar of Manuscripts in Paris Archives and Libraries Relating to the History of the Mississippi Valley to 1803. Nancy Maria Miller Surrey (1874-1951), working under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution and the direction of Waldo Gifford Leland, completed the two-volume Calendar in 1926. Because our database was built upon the foundation laid by Leland, Surrey, and their predecessors, it is important to look back at their accomplishments.

Félix Magne and Pierre Margry were the first to compile archival materials related to the history of the Mississippi Valley. In the 1840's Magne, publisher of the New Orleans newspaper L'Abeille, copied and annotated materials from the archives of the French Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies. Magne's two volumes of copied manuscripts were later purchased by the State of Louisiana whose governor at the time was Alexandre Mouton, a Louisianan of Acadian descent and a man proud of the state's French heritage. Pierre Margry, another father of this project, published several well-known works based on his research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Archives de France, and he too passed on copies of the documents he had uncovered to the State of Louisiana. Magne's Notes et Documents sur l'Histoire de la Louisiane is a treasured part of the Louisiana Historical Society's manuscripts collection, and his book Découvertes et établissements des Français dans l'ouest et dans le Sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale was quite influential in its day. Charles Gayarré, who based his Histoire de la Louisiane (1846) on Magne's work, and John Perkins, who had originally commissioned Magne and Margry to collect historical materials in France, began a similar undertaking in the 1850s to acquire Spanish documents, but this project was abandoned before its completion.

A renewed effort to copy European archival material began in 1907 when several Mississippi Valley historical societies formed a special committee, with the guidance of the American Historical Association and its president John Franklin Jameson (1859-1937), to gather materials in France, England, and Spain. Dunbar Rowland (1864-1937), the state archivist of Mississippi, took charge of the committee. While Rowland had high hopes for the project — the hundreds of Parisian documents gathered by Magne and Margry led him to believe that there were thousands more waiting to be discovered — he was unaware of the difficulties that it would encounter, most notably those arising from the division of the Louisiana Purchase into the many American states that today make up the Mississippi Valley. In spite of these challenges, Rowland gave the project an ambitious chronological scope — 1681 (La Salle begins preparations for his voyage down the Mississippi) to 1803 (The Louisiana Purchase). Rowland also began the difficult task of raising money for this perpetually underfunded project, and he chose the young Waldo Leland (1879-1966) to direct the effort. Leland, a specialist in federal archives, was associated with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., which was at that moment engaged in a larger endeavor to publish guides to the American-history materials housed in Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Russia, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba.

In 1907 Jameson and Leland traveled to Paris where Leland, with the help of Français Abel Doysié (1886-1973), began gathering and annotating materials related to American history in various Parisian libraries and ministries, including the Archives Nationales and the archives des Affaires Etrangères. When the outbreak of war forced Jameson and Leland to return home in 1914, the project seemed largely complete, but it soon became clear that this was not the case. Because so many researchers had collected so many documents from so many different institutions, organizing the materials would be a great challenge. The researchers had finished gathering Mississippi Valley materials, but these documents were in desperate need of an editor, especially since there were many duplicate entries. Leland hired David Parker, the director of manuscripts at the Public Archives of Canada, to review the thousands of pages of materials. But Parker returned to France from 1922 to 1927 to finish his work in the various Parisian libraries and in the archives of the Affaires Etrangères, and the enormous task of editing the Mississippi Valley portion of the project fell to Nancy Surrey.

Author of the remarkably erudite The Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime, 1699-1763 (1916), a work written in France while she worked for Leland, Nancy Surrey had the advantage of being familiar with the Parisian institutions from which this material had been gathered. As she worked on this project, Surrey also consulted Leland and Doysié and had access to their research notes. (Doysié was a poet, historian, and translator who, until the Second World War, directed the reproduction of French archival materials for the Library of Congress, first making manuscript copies and later using photographic reproduction.) Because the material had already been collected from the French repositories, Surrey was able to compile her Calendar in the United States, doing most of her work at the New York Public Library. In order to save time and to avoid transcription errors, the 22,589 documents were arranged in chronological order and published as planograph copies of the typescript originals. In 1926 the Carnegie Institution published Surrey's Calendar in two large volumes. Leland's work also led to two other published guides: Lawrence C. Wroth and Gertrude L. Annan's Acts of French Royal Administration concerning Canada, Guiana, the West Indies and Louisiana prior to 1791 (1926); and Waldo G. Leland, John J. Mend and Abel Doysié's Guide to Materials for American History in the Libraries and Archives of Paris (2 volumes, 1932 and 1943).

In the years that followed, many American institutions referred to the "Surrey Calendar," as it came to be known, as they built microfilm collections of these documents. In 1911 the Library of Congress began to make photostatic copies of the documents; but it was only after 1927, thanks to the Wilbur and Rockefeller endowments, that the large-scale microfilm reproduction of these documents began, an effort that adopted the 35mm format in the 1930s. In 1964 the Library of Congress appointed Ulane Zeeck Bonnel (1918-2006) to direct the reproduction of French archival materials. James O'Neill, a conservator at the Library of Congress, assisted Bonnel with this project. Then, in 1967, Glenn R. Conrad (1923-2003) began to assemble a collection of colonial records at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, an undertaking continued after 1973 by the Center for Louisiana Studies. Another historian at this university, Carl A. Brasseaux, dreamed of creating a modern "Surrey Calendar" and began to work towards this goal. Meanwhile, Alfred E. Lemmon of The Historic New Orleans Collection, who in 1984 had begun to collect microfilm copies of French archival holdings, including charts, plans, and census data, also became convinced of the need for a new edition of the 1926 Calendar, this time published as an electronic database. While Surrey's Calendar was an essential tool for researchers studying the history of the Mississippi Valley, only a small number of the books were printed, and it was not widely available. To give a telling example, in all of France researchers have access to only two copies of the Surrey's Calendar, one at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris) and the other at the Centre des archives d'Outre mer (Aix-en-Provence).

As rare and dated as it is, Surrey's Calendar remains the standard reference work for researchers and institutions, and it has served as the basis for the great majority of copy requests for archival materials. However, since the 1970s historians and researchers have continued to compile and publish Mississippi Valley materials. In 1976 a group of French archivists, with the assistance of Ulanne Bonnel, published the Guide des sources de l'histoire des Etats-Unis dans les archives françaises. While not specifically focused on Louisiana, this guide was the first attempt to investigate the materials in departmental archives in France. Milton and Norman Rieder published inventories of French materials related to Acadians in Louisiana: The Acadians in France, 1762-1776 (3 volumes, 1967-1973), and The Crew and Passenger Registration Lists of the Seven Acadian Expeditions of 1785 (1965). In a similar vein, Albert Robichaux published the results of his archival inquiries in France in three works: Acadian Marriages in France (1976), The Acadian Exiles in Nantes (1978) and The Acadian Exiles in Saint-Malo (1981). Carl Brasseaux also published a combination book/CD-Rom entitled France's Forgotten Legion (2000) which lists materials for French biography in Louisiana. Finally, I myself have compiled lists of source materials for Louisiana and French history on the bilingual internet site that I have organized for the French Ministry of Culture: www.louisiane.culture.fr (2003).

This database was conceived when, taking refuge in Lafayette from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans (August-September 2005), Alfred Lemmon ran into Carl Brasseaux. They decided to unite their efforts so that the updated form of the Calendar might one day see the light of day, and The Historic New Orleans Collection agreed to fund this ambitious project. Thus it was that Alfred Lemmon, needing a partner for the project in France, first contacted me. The first step was perhaps the most difficult: establishing current references to the cited documents. Many of the references indicated in the original Calendar were no longer accurate because of changes at the various holding institutions. Also, the Calendar had not surveyed the documents located outside of Paris. I was, naturally, quite enthusiastic about the grand scope of this project, and we all set to work. Carl Brasseaux and his students at the Center for Louisiana Studies transformed Surrey's Calendar into an internationally compatible computerized database. At the same time I began to explore the archival repositories and departmental archives outside of Paris with the hope of supplementing the list of Parisian documents that Leland and his many assistants had compiled.

Finally, students from the French Ecole nationale des Chartes began to systematically check the database entries. With a corrected system of references and the newly discovered Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley materials from outside of Paris, the Calendar has gotten better with age, and, we hope, has once again become a useful tool for students, teachers, researchers, and history lovers around the world.