First, note that the word is NOTARIAL Archives, as in notary. Now, to answer your questions. I was at the Notarial Archives several days a week for the month of March. Finding things there is a challenge, but there are ways to do it. If you're looking for slave purchases and sales, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's Afro-Louisiana Database 1718-1820 is extremely valuable. It's available online at http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/. Unfortunately, it only goes up to 1820. If you're in New Orleans, you can go to the Conveyance Office, 4th floor of the Amoco Building at 1340 Poydras, right across from City Hall, and use the Index to Purchasers and Vendors, which starts with 1827 and goes up to the present. You can search for your party's name for each year in the index to purchasers and the index to vendors. They are roughly alphabetical--for instance if you're looking for Macarty, as I was, all the names beginning with MA will be in one section. There's a column for land (terre) and a column for slaves (esclaves) that gives you a page number in the Conveyance Office Books (COBs). Then you go to the COB for that year and look up the summary of the transaction. This will usually be written in French, but occasionally they're in English. It will tell you the date, names of the parties, price, and the name of the notary. If you want even more detail about the transaction, go down to the Notarial Archives Research Center on the 3rd floor of the same building. The people there are extremely nice, and will get out the books for you. But there are other kinds of documents in the notarial books that won't show up in the COBs because they don't involve the "conveyance" of property--marriage contracts, wills, family meetings regarding a succession, and many other things. But if you can get an idea of which notary or notaries your family habitually used, the notarial books do have indexes in the front. Anytime I get my hands on a book, I look at the index and often I find something I wasn't even looking for. Again, these are going to be handwritten in French, even during the American period almost up to the turn of the 20th century (unless your family were English-speakers--all the people I'm working on were French-speakers). The very oldest ones (before 1763) are also going to be in French, and the ones from the Spanish period (1763-1803) are going to be in Spanish. The archives staff will make copies for you for a dollar a page, and often I take these home to really pore over them and try to translate them. Now, here's the good news. When I was there the last time, I learned that they're scanning all the indexes and are going to post them on their website http://www.notarialarchives.org/. I'm so thrilled about this, because it will enable me to get my citations lined up ahead of time, and then I can go right to the documents when I get there, instead of wasting time searching. > [Original Message] > From: Cheramie Breaux <chamoo@cox.net> > To: <LAORLEAN@rootsweb.com> > Date: 04/09/2008 4:40:25 PM > Subject: [LAORLEAN] notorial archives > > List, I have some questions about the notorial records/archives at > NOPL. Is there any index of those documents other than the name of the > Notary? > > Are those records, or an index of those records online? I'm in Lafayette. > The State Archives can produce a copy of a document if I can give them the > VE number, whatever that is. Would someone who knows about this, tell me > how to access that information? > > Thanks, > Cheramie