Unforgotten Lives lifts up the names and lives of some of the people I have come across in research for other projects; people for whom there remains only scarce or well-hidden documentation of their existence. At the moment, it centers around the Pensacola area, but I hope to expand the geography as the project evolves.
Please check back frequently; researching and entering records is ongoing.
Things to Remember as You Search:
- An asterisk (*) after the last name indicates that it was the name of the household with which an individual was associated – sometimes freely, but often through slavery. The individual may very well have used a different surname that was not recorded or that has not yet been discovered. (This page has some good information on enslaved individuals and their surnames.)
- The term of race or ethnicity you’ll find in an individual’s record is the one used within the primary referenced source. How a person is described in each source is rather subjective and will depend upon the language of the person making the record and their social background. For instance, the term moreno was passing out of common usage by the time of the 1820 Spanish census of Pensacola, but Father James Coleman at St. Michael’s still used it in baptismal records.
(Terms of race and ethnicity can be confusing, as white Americans and colonial Europeans – especially at some points in history – were ridiculously obsessed with figuring out everyone’s place in the racial hierarchy. This page might help.)
- For records from the early Gulf Coast (particularly Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans): This area during the colonial era and in the decades immediately after was a multi-lingual society. Records were kept in Spanish, English, and French. Names will shift among their equivalents depending upon what language was used in the record. For example, a girl baptized as Juana by a Spanish priest will later be sold by a French owner as Jeanne; Santiago Colman and Don Enrique Michelet are also known as James Coleman and Henry Michelet. The free woman of color called Carlota Esteban in the 1820 Spanish census of Pensacola is later found in a deed as Charlotte Etienne.