Archivists work to save parish sacramental records from mold, mildew By Ron Brocato _Catholic News Service_ (http://www.catholicnews.com/index.html) BATON ROUGE, La. (CNS) -- Although all of the records and artifacts most vital to the Archdiocese of New Orleans were saved before Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29, many of the individual parishes' sacramental records were lost or badly contaminated. Charles Nolan, archivist for the New Orleans Archdiocese, and his counterpart in the Baton Rouge Diocese, Emilie Leumas, have been working feverishly to save the recovered records. They anticipate a new set of document preservation procedures will rise from the mold and mildew. "All the sources we know of on a national level (pertaining) to records recovery for conservation when things are wet say to do (certain things) within the first 48 hours," Leumas said. "Well, our records have been wet for 48 days or more, and there is no playbook for this." There is no proven process to salvage items that have been ravaged by a combination of murky water, heat and humidity that accumulates in closed quarters. "But when this is over, we will be able to talk at national meetings about what we did," Leumas told the Clarion Herald, New Orleans' archdiocesan newspaper. "It will create an entirely new chapter in restoration guides." Records from nine Catholic parishes have been sent to Louisiana State University and are undergoing a procedure that freezes a document at minus-20 degrees Fahrenheit for 72 hours to kill the mold. Nolan and Leumas will then clean and preserve the records on microfilm. "The most valuable records, things like the old church wardens' records that go back to 1756, and valuable photographs that we have from the (Hilaire) Belloc collection, we got out of the (Ursuline) convent immediately," Nolan said. "So we have not lost any of the historical records so far." But sacramental records from 25 of the archdiocese's 151 parishes and missions still are unaccounted for. These records include marriages, baptisms, first Communions, confirmations and funerals. "The pastors who took their records with them when they evacuated before the storm or took the records to a safe place, those records have come here" to the archives at the Catholic Life Center in Baton Rouge, Nolan said. "Thankfully, many of the pastors in St. Bernard (civil parish) did that so we will be able to save very much of that parish's history." But some pastors felt, in good faith, that they had safe places to store their sacramental records in their rectories. They discovered that while the storm itself did not harm the vital papers, other elements did. Some journals are badly decomposed to a degree the archivists say they may have to re-create them from scratch. "A lot of priests thought that if they wrapped the records in plastic and put them in a safe, they'd be OK," Nolan said. "One priest put his church's records in an ice chest on the second floor of his rectory," he added. "They survived the hurricane, but the looters came in and stole the ice chest. Fortunately, they left the sacramental records." He said the archdiocese has to develop a policy to safely send away sacramental records when there is a mandatory evacuation for an impending disaster. "The lesson learned from this is that it could happen again, and if it does happen again, how do we prepare for it and prepare for it better than we did this time," Nolan said. He estimated that about 98 percent of all sacramental records have been backed up and most are saved on microfilm. New Orleans is the only diocese in North America ("and maybe all the Americas") that also records weekly church bulletins on microfilm, Nolan said. Nolan, who lost homes in New Orleans and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, called Leumas "my guardian angel" for offering the assistance of the Diocese of Baton Rouge archives and staff, taking charge to save some of the New Orleans records and making key contacts to get the restoration process started. "In the first two weeks it was hard for me to concentrate, so she guided me through the decisions," he said. "Her staff has been working side by side with us. "I'm not sure if she is my right-hand man or I'm hers," Nolan said.