An effort to bring information on the lives of early St. Augustine residents to a wider audience has gotten a boost from the National Archives.
The archives awarded a $250,000 grant to La Florida: The Interactive Digital Archives of the Americas, a website project led by historian Michael Francis and his team from the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.
The site, laflorida.org, provides a database of thousands of people who lived in colonial Florida, along with maps, documents and other features.
The grant will go toward the laflorida.org project called “Europeans, Indians, and Africans: Lost Voices from America’s Parish Archive, 1594-1821,” according to a news release from the university.
One goal of the project is to make Catholic church records in St. Augustine available and easily searchable for people around the world. The project will add to the people already listed on laflorida.org.
“So there are about 4,500 people on the list -- on the database right now, and the parish records will likely add close to 10,000 more, is what we’re anticipating,” Francis said.
Francis, who shared details of the project on Wednesday night at the Governor’s House Cultural Center and Museum in St. Augustine, said the grant will help improve technology for the website.
People will be able to go to the site and search the diocese archives for things such as baptisms, marriages and deaths with filters such as age, cause of death, gender and race, he said. People will also be able to create infographics.
According to the university, “These ecclesiastical records, which number around 9,000 handwritten documents, provide rare insight into the daily lives and relationships of the multi-ethnic population of Europeans, Africans and Native American residents that comprised (St. Augustine).”
Francis, who can read centuries-old Spanish documents, had been building data on people for years as part of his scholarly research.
Francis said he jokes that he wants to write a book about 10 people from the 16th century that he wishes he could have taken a pub.
One such person was a soldier who made up a story about Drake’s Raid. Francis Drake and his crews burned the city in 1586.
"(The soldier) had all kinds of challenges with the governor, got into trouble a number of times, and then went back to Spain after Francis Drake attacked St. Augustine and told an incredible story of how the governor basically invented that Drake burned the city down ... He said the governor stole all the money from … the coffers and gave it all to his friends because they knew Drake was coming,“ he said.
Francis said he wants to make many other documents about colonial St. Augustine easily readable and searchable for the world. It’s a project that he believes will outlive him.
“9,000 pages of parish records is nothing compared to what’s available in Spanish archives, Italian, Mexican, Cuban, French, British. In other words, St. Augustine’s historical patrimony is recorded in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of original documents. ... My students always joke that my tombstone will read, ‘He barely started.’ That’s probably true,” Francis said.