Louisiana Genealogy

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Louisiana Genealogy Research Guide

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Louisiana Genealogy Research Guide

Quick Facts

Louisiana’s records grow out of a century of French and Spanish rule before the territory ever became American, and that colonial inheritance still shapes research at every turn. It is the country’s only civil-law state, its counties are called parishes, and its earliest life events are recorded not in courthouses but in Catholic sacramental registers and the acts of civil-law notaries. Tracing a Louisiana family means moving between French, Spanish, and American jurisdictions and knowing which one held the pen.

• Capital: Baton Rouge. New Orleans served as the colonial and early state capital; the seat of government moved to Baton Rouge around 1849–1850, and it shifted temporarily to Opelousas and then Shreveport during the Civil War.
• Statehood: April 30, 1812, the eighteenth state, formed from the Territory of Orleans, which had been organized in 1804 out of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
• Parishes: 64. Louisiana is the only state whose primary civil divisions are parishes rather than counties. The Territory of Orleans was first divided into civil parishes in 1807; the last parishes were carved out in the early twentieth century (Evangeline in 1910, and Allen, Beauregard, and Jefferson Davis in 1912).
• Land type: Louisiana has a mixed land-records system. Its oldest settled areas were granted by French and Spanish colonial authorities, and after 1803 those grants were adjudicated by United States commissioners as private land claims. At the same time Louisiana is a federal (public-domain) state: most of its area was surveyed under the federal rectangular system and patented through the General Land Office, so federal land-patent records do exist here alongside the colonial claims.
• Nickname and motto: the Pelican State; the state motto is Union, Justice, and Confidence.
• Where records live: most genealogical records — conveyances, successions, and many vital events — are kept at the parish level by the Clerk of Court, while New Orleans (Orleans Parish) keeps its vital records in a separate system, with the older records held by the state and the city.

Libraries and Archives

Louisiana’s richest collections cluster in New Orleans, which holds municipal, notarial, and immigrant records, and in Baton Rouge, which holds state-government records; parish courthouses, public libraries, and local historical societies hold material for their own areas. The principal Louisiana repositories include:

• Louisiana State Archives (Secretary of State, Baton Rouge) — state vital-record indexes, Confederate pension records, colonial and territorial records, and the state’s civil-registration files.
• State Library of Louisiana (Baton Rouge) — local histories, published genealogies, newspapers, city directories, and manuscripts.
• New Orleans Public Library, City Archives and Louisiana Division — New Orleans municipal records, older city vital records, colonial and city court records, and city directories.
• New Orleans Notarial Archives — an unbroken run of civil-law notarial acts from the colonial era: land sales, marriage contracts, inventories, and successions unique to Louisiana research.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection, Williams Research Center — manuscripts, maps, and colonial and antebellum records of the lower Mississippi Valley.
• LSU Libraries Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library — the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, plantation and family papers, and colonial documents.
• Amistad Research Center (Tulane University) — the leading repository for African American and ethnic-history manuscripts.
• Louisiana Historical Society and the Louisiana Genealogical and Historical Society — the statewide societies, publishers of long-running genealogical journals.
• National Archives at Fort Worth — federal court, naturalization, census, passenger-arrival, and military records for Louisiana.
• The FamilySearch Library and its worldwide FamilySearch Centers hold extensive Louisiana microfilm and digital collections, and parish courthouses (Clerk of Court), parish libraries, and local historical societies hold records for their own areas.

Major Websites

These sites host digitized Louisiana records and indexes. Subscription sites are marked ($).

• FamilySearch — free; the backbone finding aid, with the FamilySearch Wiki, catalog, and large digitized collections of Louisiana vital, land, probate, court, and church records.
• Ancestry ($) — extensive Louisiana vital, census, naturalization, military, and church collections.
• MyHeritage ($) — Louisiana vital records, censuses, and immigration collections.
• Louisiana Digital Library — free; digitized photographs, manuscripts, maps, and record series from libraries and archives across the state.
• Louisiana State Archives Vital Records Indexes — free; the state’s online indexes to Orleans Parish births and deaths and to statewide deaths.
• Chronicling America — free; the Library of Congress newspaper archive, including many Louisiana titles.
• Internet Archive and HathiTrust — free; digitized Louisiana histories, published record abstracts, and law books.
• BLM General Land Office Records — free; federal land patents for Louisiana’s public-domain lands.
• Find a Grave and BillionGraves — free; cemetery listings, photographs, and transcriptions.

Law and Government

Louisiana’s civil-law tradition sets it apart from every other state, and its legal history explains the very shape of its records — the notarial act, the succession, and the community-property marriage all descend from French and Spanish law. Many foundational texts have been digitized and are free to read.

• A Digest of the Civil Laws now in Force in the Territory of Orleans (1808) — the “Digest of 1808,” the first codification of Louisiana’s civil law; free on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.
• Civil Code of the State of Louisiana (1825), with the revision of 1870 — the landmark statements of Louisiana civil law; free on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust.
• The French colonial Code Noir (introduced in Louisiana in 1724) and the Spanish colonial law that governed from 1763 to 1803 (drawn from the Recopilación de Indias and Las Siete Partidas) are described and reprinted in digitized colonial-document collections.
• The Acts and session laws of the Territory of Orleans and the State of Louisiana are digitized on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust and trace the creation of parishes, courts, and offices.
• The Louisiana State Archives holds the state’s legislative and executive records, and the published territorial and early state documents help identify which body created which records.

Vital Records (Birth, Marriage, Death)

Statewide civil registration of births and deaths began in 1911, administered by the state board of health; marriages were recorded at the parish level from each parish’s creation, so there is no single statewide marriage start date. Compliance with the early statewide system was uneven, and for events before civil registration the essential substitutes are Catholic sacramental registers and notarial marriage contracts.

New Orleans (Orleans Parish). The city kept vital records far earlier and separately from the rest of the state. Orleans Parish death records survive from the early 1800s and birth and marriage records from the early nineteenth century, and the older records are now held by the Louisiana State Archives and the New Orleans Public Library City Archives. Use the state’s free online indexes to find a certificate, then order the record.

• Statewide (outside New Orleans): records are held by the Louisiana Vital Records Registry and, for older records, by the Louisiana State Archives and the parish Clerk of Court; a fee applies and records become public after set intervals, with earlier access for direct-line descendants.
• Orleans Parish births and deaths: the Louisiana State Archives hosts free searchable indexes to New Orleans birth and death records for the years now open to the public.
• Statewide deaths: the Louisiana State Archives statewide death index covers the early years of civil registration and is free to search.
• Vital records collections online: Louisiana birth, marriage, and death indexes are also searchable on Ancestry ($) and free on FamilySearch.

History and Timeline of Major Events

Key dates that shaped Louisiana’s jurisdictions and records:

• 1699 — Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville establishes the French colony of Louisiana on the Gulf Coast.
• 1718 — New Orleans is founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville.
• 1724 — the Code Noir is promulgated in Louisiana, governing enslaved and free people of color.
• 1763 — France cedes Louisiana west of the Mississippi and the city of New Orleans to Spain; Spanish administration takes hold later in the decade.
• 1764 — the first Acadian exiles begin arriving, settling the Attakapas, Opelousas, and river parishes.
• 1788 — the Good Friday fire of March 21 destroys much of New Orleans; a second great fire follows on December 8, 1794.
• 1800–1802 — Spain retrocedes Louisiana to France.
• 1803 — the Louisiana Purchase transfers the territory to the United States.
• 1804 — the Territory of Orleans is organized.
• 1810 — the Republic of West Florida is declared, and the Florida Parishes east of the Mississippi are annexed to the Territory of Orleans.
• April 30, 1812 — Louisiana is admitted as the eighteenth state.
• January 8, 1815 — the Battle of New Orleans, the last major engagement of the War of 1812.
• 1849–1850 — the state capital moves from New Orleans to Baton Rouge.
• 1862 — Union forces capture New Orleans; the state government relocates to Opelousas and later Shreveport.
• 1911 — statewide civil registration of births and deaths begins.
• 1910–1912 — the last parishes are created, completing the state’s sixty-four.

Census Records and Substitutes

Federal censuses were taken every ten years, and Louisiana first appears as the Territory of Orleans in the census of 1810; it is enumerated in every census from 1810 through 1950, though most of the 1890 federal census was destroyed nationwide. They are free on FamilySearch and on the National Archives 1950 census site and are also searchable on Ancestry ($) and MyHeritage ($).

Colonial censuses are a distinctive Louisiana strength, filling the century before the first federal count. French and Spanish officials enumerated the colony repeatedly, often district by district — New Orleans, the German Coast, the Acadian Coast, Pointe Coupee, Natchitoches, Opelousas, and Attakapas — and many of these lists name heads of household with counts of dependents, while later ones name every person. The French-era counts are gathered in Charles R. Maduell’s The Census Tables for the French Colony of Louisiana from 1699 Through 1732, and the Spanish-era counts in Jacqueline K. Voorhies’s Some Late Eighteenth-Century Louisianians.

• French period: enumerations survive for 1699, 1706, 1708, 1721, 1722, 1723, 1724, 1726, 1727, 1731, and 1732, ranging from small garrison and settler lists to fuller counts of households along the river.
• Spanish period: district censuses survive for 1763, 1766, 1769, 1770, 1777, 1784, 1785, 1787, 1788, 1791, and 1795, many of them naming every free resident and often the enslaved by number, which makes them valuable for placing families before American rule.

Substitutes. Where censuses are thin, city directories (New Orleans directories survive from the early nineteenth century), tax lists, and Catholic sacramental registers are the best substitutes for placing a family in a given year.

Church Records

Because civil registration is late, church records are the single most important substitute for vital records before the twentieth century, and in Louisiana that means Catholic records above all. Under French and Spanish rule the colony was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and parish priests recorded baptisms, marriages, and burials — often the only surviving record of a birth, wedding, or death — from 1718 onward.

• The Archdiocese of New Orleans holds sacramental registers from 1718; the published series Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans abstracts the colonial and early American registers volume by volume.
• The Diocese of Baton Rouge Department of Archives publishes Catholic Church Records of the Diocese of Baton Rouge, whose earliest volume begins in 1707 and whose series continues through the nineteenth century across the river and Florida Parishes.
• The dioceses of Lafayette, Houma–Thibodaux, Alexandria, Lake Charles, and Shreveport hold registers for their own regions, and thousands of digitized registers can be found through the FamilySearch Catalog by parish and town.
• Protestant congregations (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist) grew after 1803, and Jewish congregational records survive for New Orleans; these are held by the congregations, by LSU Special Collections, and by the Amistad Research Center.

Court Records

Louisiana’s courts changed with each change of sovereignty, and their records reach well beyond lawsuits into estates, marriage contracts, emancipations, and land. The main bodies a researcher encounters are:

• the Superior Council of Louisiana (the French colonial governing and judicial council, to 1769), whose surviving records are among the richest colonial sources;
• the Cabildo (the Spanish colonial council and court, 1769–1803), whose “Spanish Judicial Records” document lawsuits, estates, and sales;
• the parish District Courts, the main trial courts under American rule, which through the parish Clerk of Court keep civil and criminal cases, successions, and land conveyances;
• historic New Orleans courts, including the early Court of Probates and the Civil District Court, whose records are held by the city and state.

The colonial Superior Council and Spanish Judicial records are held by the Louisiana Historical Center of the Louisiana State Museum, and later case files remain with the parish Clerks of Court.

Ethnic/Minority Records

Louisiana has been diverse since its founding, and knowing where a group settled points to the records most likely to document a family.

• French and Acadians (Cajuns). Acadian exiles arriving from 1764 settled the Attakapas, Opelousas, and Acadian Coast; Catholic registers, the colonial censuses, and the Diocese of Baton Rouge and Lafayette record series document these families.
• Spanish and Isleños. Canary Islanders settled St. Bernard Parish and nearby districts in the 1770s and 1780s; their descendants are documented in Spanish-period censuses and church registers and by the Los Isleños heritage community.
• Free people of color and enslaved African Americans. Louisiana had both a large enslaved population and a substantial community of gens de couleur libres (free people of color) who appear in notarial acts, sacramental registers, manumissions, and property records. The Amistad Research Center is the flagship repository, and the Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy databases index tens of thousands of enslaved people from colonial and antebellum records.
• Creoles. Louisiana Creoles of French, Spanish, and African descent are documented through sacramental, notarial, and census records across the river parishes and New Orleans.
• Germans. Settlers of the 1720s founded the German Coast (Côte des Allemands) in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes and appear in the colonial censuses and Catholic registers.
• Italians. A large Sicilian and southern Italian immigration came through the Port of New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is documented in passenger lists and parish registers.
• Native peoples. The Houma, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Tunica-Biloxi, Natchez, and Caddo peoples lived across the state; their histories are documented in colonial records, tribal archives, and federal Indian records.

Immigration and Naturalization

The Port of New Orleans was the nation’s second-busiest immigrant gateway after New York, drawing Irish, German, Italian, and other arrivals up the Mississippi and into the interior. Passenger manifests survive from 1820, and the port’s records are a mainstay of Louisiana immigration research.

• New Orleans Passenger Lists, 1820–1945 ($); the manifests are also free on FamilySearch.
• Quarterly abstracts and indexes to the earliest New Orleans arrivals are on FamilySearch and Ancestry.

Naturalization. Before 1906 any court of record — federal, parish, or city — could naturalize, so records are scattered among the parish Clerks of Court and the federal courts; after 1906 the process was federalized. County-equivalent naturalization records are on FamilySearch, and the federal naturalizations and passenger microfilm are held by the National Archives at Fort Worth.

Land Records

Louisiana’s land records reflect its layered history, and the first question in any land search is whether a tract began as a colonial grant or as federal public-domain land. Original title in the oldest settled areas flowed from French and Spanish authorities as concessions and grants; after 1803 those claimants had to prove title before United States commissioners, whose confirmations were reported to Congress and printed in the American State Papers, Public Lands. Elsewhere the land was surveyed under the federal rectangular system and sold as public domain, so patents were issued through the General Land Office.

Where the records are kept.

• Parish level: deeds and mortgages are recorded by the Clerk of Court (in Orleans Parish, by the notaries and the city’s conveyance and mortgage offices).
• Federal patents: the BLM General Land Office Records site holds the land patents for Louisiana’s public-domain lands, searchable by patentee.
• State level: the Louisiana State Land Office holds state land records, including swamp-land grants and school-section lands, and the Louisiana State Archives holds colonial and territorial land papers.

The colonial land claims. Because the confirmed French and Spanish grants underlie so much of the older parishes, the printed private-land-claim reports and the surveyors’ plats are essential. The American State Papers, Public Lands volumes, free on the Internet Archive and HathiTrust, list the claimants of the lower Mississippi Valley, the German and Acadian coasts, and the Red River and Natchitoches districts, with the acreage and the basis of each claim.

Online, Louisiana Land Records is free on FamilySearch and browsable by parish, and FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed deeds, grants, and notarial acts searchable by every name they contain, including grantors, grantees, witnesses, and neighbors.

Military Records

Louisiana took part in the colonial wars and in every American conflict, and its military records run from Spanish militia rolls to the regiments of the Civil War.

• Colonial: French and Spanish militia rolls survive within the colonial censuses and Spanish military records, listing able-bodied men by district.
• War of 1812: Louisiana militia and volunteer units that fought in the Battle of New Orleans are documented in federal service records and published rosters on FamilySearch, Fold3, and Ancestry ($).
• Civil War: Louisiana furnished many Confederate regiments and also Union units, including the Louisiana Native Guards, among the first Black regiments mustered into the Union Army; the Louisiana State Archives holds the state’s Confederate pension applications, indexed online, with compiled service records on Ancestry ($) and free on FamilySearch.
• Later conflicts: Spanish-American War and World War I draft registration cards and service records are on FamilySearch and Ancestry.

Probate Records

In Louisiana’s civil-law system probate is called succession, and succession files — the inventory of the estate, the list of heirs, and the partition of property — are among the richest sources for family relationships, especially because community-property rules make a spouse’s and children’s shares explicit.

• Colonial era: estate inventories and successions appear in the French Superior Council records, the Spanish Judicial Records, and the acts of the colonial notaries.
• American era: successions are handled by the parish District Court (historically the Court of Probates in New Orleans), with the files kept by the parish Clerk of Court.

Online, Louisiana succession and probate records are described and partly digitized on FamilySearch and browsable by parish, and FamilySearch Full-Text Search makes many unindexed successions and inventories searchable by every name they contain.

Tax Records

Tax lists place a family in a specific parish and year and are valuable substitutes where censuses, successions, or conveyances are missing; several consecutive years can reveal when a young man came of age, moved, or died and left heirs.

• Colonial and Spanish-period assessments appear alongside the district censuses, listing landholders and, often, their stock and enslaved laborers.
• Parish personal-property and land-tax rolls are held by the parish Clerks of Court and assessors, and some are digitized on FamilySearch.
• U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862–1918 ($) — Civil War–era and later federal income, license, and luxury taxes, with the Louisiana lists also free on FamilySearch.