French Archives Records

Microfilm of the fonds des colonies serie C13A, Volumes 1-53, covering French occupation of North America, 1694-1819. Filmed as part of the Louisiana Colonial Records Project in 1980, the C13A series covers reports, letters, maps, and other materials on the French settlement and colonization of Louisiana, West Florida, Pensacola, the upper Mississippi River Valley, the Illinois Territory, Canada and other areas of North America. The size of this research archives is beyond the scope of this Guide to describe, but there is considerable data on settlements, Indians, transportation, forts, shipwrecks, battles and war, Jesuit activity, troop movements, and more. Most materials are in French language.



Microfilm also includes select folios of records from the archives of Santa Domingo (ADC 1 and 2).



With maps of Fort Conde and Fort Charlotte (Mobile), excerpts from Mobile newspapers, 1821-1824, photographs of manuscripts which include letters on William Augustus Bowles and Alexander McGillivray, Creek Indian activities at Pensacola, and John Forbes.



Includes the diary, 1815-1835, of Major George Birch (d. 1837) concerning army life in the south including a description of the Battle of New Orleans and Indian troubles. Photocopied from the George Birch Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.



Includes photocopies of the papers, 1820-1823, of Abraham L. Sands (1781-1840) including correspondence, orders, requisitions, legal papers, invoices, and inventories relating to Army life in Florida; of special note are materials related to Mobile, New Orleans, Fort Charlotte, Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky, Fort St. Marks, the Apalachicola River, Pensacola, Fort San Carlos de Barrancas, the 1821 hurricane, and Fort Petite Coqueille. From originals in the Yale University Library.



NOTE: MF 1036-1097 are microfilm copies of the Louisiana Colonial Records Project microfilmed at the Archives Nationales, Paris, for the Library of Congress, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Loyola University of New Orleans, Memphis State University, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1970.



NOTE: This accumulation of material was located by Dr. William S. Coker in Mobile, Alabama; it appears that the local CETA office funded research into the early history of Mobile and a researcher gathered pertinent material from the French National Archives, from university collections, and other research centers. As such it represents an accumulation of materials primarily centering on French activity on the Gulf Coast in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.