- A more complete list of Louisiana notaries can be found on the website of the Notorial Archives Research Center.
- At this time the efforts of Encyclopedia Louisiana are focused on the year 1803, certainly a year of transition for the people of Louisiana. In the last two months of the year they are transformed from subjects of His Catholic Majesty, the King of Spain to citizens of Imperial France under Napoleon to citizens of the United States.
- Many of these notarial acts are reactions to, or anticipations of, these tremendous changes. The people of Louisiana sold, bought or donated property including slaves, formed and dissolved partnerships, collected and paid off debts and protested the acts of others.
- A closer look at these acts tells a lot more about the people and their concerns. If you want to research a house's history or learn more about an ancestor this is where you go. Most of the acts in 1803 are in French or Spanish. You can easily obtain a copy of the acts or read them directly from microfilm. Photocopies are not always clear, due to the paper used at that time and the conditions under which the records were kept originally. The staff of the research center are very understanding and helpful.
- The notarial acts listed on these pages are from "direct" indices which were created by the WPA in the 1930s. Some notarial offices also created an indirect index which can prove equally as important, since some volumes and acts were missed by the WPA. The scope and wording of these indices can reflect the habits of the notary or the researcher who compiled the index.
- A direct index lists the seller in the first column of the index. The second column will end with the word (sold) to indicating the buyer. The WPA researcher sometimes included indirect references, indicated when the second column ends in (sold) by.Different types of transactions may use different prepositions to help describe the transaction. Some payments may be received of the payer or the receipt given to the payer depending on the wording of the WPA researcher. The result is the same.
- The direct indices are located in the front of the notary volumes. These actual WPA indicies are in alphabetical order by name of the seller or direct reference, which may be an easier reference for you. In the Encyclopedia Louisiana we have mixed the various notaries in a chronologically ordered index with each month of a year having its own page, However, the encyclopedia has the advantage of providing a Find Command through your browser which can help you find both direct and indirect references of a particular person. In the future we will provide a search engine.
- At the research center you may be asked to look through the notary volumes to verify an act that you want photocopied. You may also elect to research directly through these volumes. I have found the staff's knowlege of the languages and the nuances of the notary business very helpful in discovering more about particular acts. The website of the Notorial Archives Research Center also has an excellent description of the duties and importance of the civil notary.
- In our index you will find references to a particular notary act in a simple form. The first two or three letters indicate the notary, followed by the volume and then the page or act number in that volume. For instance in the references pp-v44p453 and cx-v19p127 pp is a reference to Pedro Pedesclaux and cx is Carlos Ximenes. The volumes are 44 and 19 respectively and the page numbers are 453 and 127. Page numbers refer to both sides of a leaf so make sure that you turn the page to check for the start of the act you are researching. Some notaries number by act and an act may be half a page or several pages long.
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