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STEVEN W. HACKEL INTRODUCTION his volume has its origins in historical documents and identity- changing interactions initiated two hundred and forty years ago Twith the establishment of Mission San Diego on July 16, 1769. On that day the Franciscans inaugurated the first mission in what would eventually be a chain of missions that stretched from San Diego to just north of San Francisco. More than a year and a half later, in the first months of 1771, the Kumeyaay allowed the missionaries to baptize a few of their children at Mission San Diego.1 Most likely the first Indian baptized at San Diego was a three-year-old boy whom the padres named “Francisco Antonio”; he was the son of a village leader who himself would be baptized in 1771 or 1772 and named “Carlos.”2 In the eyes of the missionaries, baptism and the bestowal of a Spanish name signified an identity shift that began to transform an Indian into a Spaniard, a pagan into a Catholic. In keeping with Catholic practice, the names of these Kumeyaay and the sacraments they received would have been duly recorded by the Franciscans in the mission’s baptism register. The details of these first baptisms at San Diego and those of some five hundred other Kumeyaay are not known to us today in full because the register in which the padres recorded them was destroyed in 1775 when Carlos and Fran- cisco Antonio’s uncle, Francisco, led an attack that killed Father Luis Jayme and burned the mission to the ground.3 Soon after the attack, how- ever, the Franciscans painstakingly reconstructed the baptism register from memory in a volume that survives to this day. By the time missionaries began to recreate the baptism register of Mission San Diego, Franciscans had established four more missions in California: San Carlos Borromeo (1770), San Antonio de Padua (1771), San Gabriel Arcángel (1771), and San Luis Obispo (1772). In these early years, missionaries baptized more than one thousand Indians, believ- ing that they were cultivating in them the rudiments of a Spanish 1 2 Steven W. Hackel Catholic identity. In the coming decades, the padres would establish six- teen more missions as well as a chapel at the presidio of Santa Barbara and a church in the pueblo of Los Angeles. At all of these sites, just as at Mission San Diego, missionaries dutifully administered and meticulously recorded thousands of sacraments. In so doing, they contributed to a set of records that would encompass nearly the entirety of the region’s colonial population. While there is no countervailing set of records from In- dians describing colonial California,4 these baptism, marriage, and burial registers constitute an amazingly thorough record of the lives of the In- dians, soldiers, settlers, and missionaries of colonial California. And al- though there has been heated debate during the last two hundred and forty years over the goals, the morality, and the legacy of the mission en- terprise and its effects on California Indians, scholars have never doubted the importance of the sacramental registers to an understanding of the people of Alta California.5 California Mission Sacramental Registers California Franciscans, of course, created the sacramental registers for their own purposes, not those of future historians. During the early mod- ern period, the Catholic Church required all Catholic priests, including missionaries along the Spanish frontier of North America, to record in detail all of the sacraments they administered. This not only reduced the likelihood that missionaries would re-baptize an individual but also en- sured that they did not violate canonical guidelines that disallowed Catholic marriages between closely related individuals. The sacramental records also allowed the Franciscans to demonstrate to a cash-strapped and over -extended Spanish state a quantitative if not qualitative record of the advance of Catholicism in Alta California. Thus, when California missionaries baptized an individual—whether an Indian adult or a new- born Spanish child—they recorded that person’s given Spanish name, godparents, place of origin, age, parents, siblings, and, when applicable, the individual’s children and marital status, as well as any other family relations or facts that they considered relevant to that person’s identity. Furthermore, in California, as an aid to recordkeeping, missionaries assigned each baptism a unique number, beginning with the number one for the first baptism at each mission. Similarly, when they married or buried someone and performed the associated sacraments, missionaries recorded that individual’s Spanish name, age, marital status, place of baptism, family relations, and, when known, their baptism number and mission of baptism. Franciscans also assigned marriage and burial records unique numbers at each mission. Thus, at any given time, the Introduction 3 missionaries could determine how many baptisms, marriages, and burials they had performed at each mission. The padres also believed that these records gave them a clear way of identifying individual Indians within the growing ranks of neophytes at each mission.6 Remarkably—given the political instability of California as it shifted from Spanish to Mexican rule, and then to U.S. statehood—the baptism, marriage, and burial records for California’s twenty-one missions, the Santa Barbara presidio, and the Los Angeles Plaza church survive with but a few exceptions. Altogether, the sacramental registers from these sites contain records on more than 100,000 baptisms, 70,000 burials, and 28,000 marriages that the Franciscans administered between 1769 and 1850. Collectively, these mission registers contain not only much of the information necessary to reconstruct the lives of tens of thousands of Indians and settlers but also the raw materials for the discovery and writ- ing of larger and more intimate histories of colonial California. A prerequisite for these new histories was a workable system that would allow scholars to access the information in the sacramental registers. Throughout much of the twentieth century, scholars skilled in read- ing eighteenth-century Spanish handwriting consulted mission records here and there as they sought to piece together the lives of notable Cali- fornians and the mission Indian communities of the region.7 Some, like genealogists Thomas Workman Temple and Marie E. Northrop, devoted decades to the careful study of mission records and the creation of ge- nealogies of the families of the “Californios,”the non-Indian settlers of the region.8 In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars of California Indians turned to the sacramental records to examine Indian population decline.9 And in the 1980s and 1990s, a new generation of historians and anthropologists— emboldened by the power of the microprocessor and emerging database software—brought together a desire to document the tremendous diver- sity and depth of Indian life in early California with an interest in creat- ing data sets of linked records for individual missions and then clusters of related missions. These could shed light on events previously unseen by historians and perhaps even by historical actors themselves. In this re- gard, Randall T. Milliken, who works on the missions and Indians of Northern California, and John R. Johnson, who studies the missions and Indians of the Santa Barbara region, were pioneers.10 In the mid-1990s, after working on my own databases of the records of Missions San Carlos and San Gabriel, I became aware of the need for a comprehensive database that would bring together the sacramental records of all the missions into a uniform and integrated system. Such a database would include the records, not just of Indians or Californios, 4 Steven W. Hackel A page from the Mission Santa Clara Book of Baptisms in which Fathers Tomás de la Peña, José Antonio Murguía, and Junípero Serra recorded baptisms. Tomás de la Peña records that Sebastian José, an Indian whom the Franciscans had baptized without the full ceremonies because they believed he was gravely ill, has now been given a complete baptism. José Murguía states that he has baptized the seven-day-old child of a soldier serving as a guard at the mission. And Junípero Serra writes that he has baptized two young boys from villages in the vicinity of Mission San Clara. Courtesy of Santa Clara University Archives. Introduction 5 but of all the people of early California who came within the scope of the missions. Without this comprehensive and integrated database, it was impossible, many of us reasoned, to see the movements of Indians and settlers from one part of the province to another or to grasp various so- cial processes and patterns of historical change that unfolded across all of the missions, presidios, and pueblos of colonial California. The creation of this comprehensive database required institutional support, as it was too vast an undertaking for one person or even a group of re- searchers. In 1998, just when this project was being conceptualized, Robert C. Ritchie, W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Henry E. Huntington Library, saw the importance of this endeavor. With his backing and the institutional support of the Huntington, the Early California Population Project (ECPP) was born.11 It would prove to be a Huntington-led collaborative project, one that would involve numerous scholars, a team of data-entry personnel, grants from a wide range of in- stitutions, and nearly a decade of work. Following the completion of an online version of this database in the summer of 2006 and its installation on the Huntington’s website, the project has been used by an increasingly wide range of scholars, genealogists, historians, teachers, Indian groups, and government agencies.12 All have profited from easy access to mission records like those initiated at San Diego so long ago that had remained beyond the reach and use of nearly everyone for centuries.

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