Explanation for some fields
Race : The most difficult classification to decide on when we were structuring BARDSS was Race. Racial terminologies differed greatly from one region to another in the Atlantic World, and also shifted over time. Trying to find the Brazilian equivalent of a classification based on skin color used in Cuba could be possible but intellectually risky. In addition, homogenizing racial definitions into a single term in English would erase the variety of racial categories in Latin America. In fact, there were no U.S. equivalents in to the many ways people were classified by race in Brazil, Cuba, or Colombia. In light of this, the best approach for BARDSS was to use the original word used in the document, in its original language, leaving the problem of interpretation to historians using the data.
Origin : Baptism records do not explicitly refer to the origin of the person being baptized. However, the priest frequently recorded the “nation” of individuals. We have combined these terms into an umbrella category, Origin. There are three kinds of origins in BARDSS: Creole, African, and Other. In Spanish and Portuguese America, people of African descent born in the Americas were called criollo, or creole. This allows us to impute the origin of any newborn child as Creole. Sometimes adults (although usually not the individual baptized) are referred to as Creoles, which means that this person was born in the same region in which the baptism took place. Usually, however, individuals baptized as adults were Africans who had recently arrived in the Americas. For Africans, the records almost always make mention of their nation, a concept that we will explain below. These African nations are listed under the category of African. Finally, the field Others includes diverse origins that are not African or from the same region where the baptism is performed. For instance, an adult individual baptized in Cuba may not be African, but instead originally from a non-Catholic region of the Americas, like Jamaica or South Carolina.
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Origin-African "nations" : African nations reflect ideas and attitudes about Africa and Africans held by slave owning societies in the Americas. It is extremely doubtful that many individuals identified as Congo, for example, would have called themselves such wherever in West-Central Africa they were from. Historians have debated the degree to which African nationalities in American slave societies were African identities at all. In fact, these terms may tell us more about the patterns of the slave trade than they do about the ancestral identities of its victims. Yet, in American contexts, these identities became meaningful for the people who claimed them. For instance, there is an extensive historical and anthropological literature on the practices of Cuban organizations called cabildos de nacion, comprised of Africans and their descendants sharing a common national identity. The fact that the African nations appearing in baptismal records were peculiar to their specific slave societies is underscored by the different terms used to describe people from the same African regions in different parts of the Americas. The same two women referred to as Congo and Lucumi in a Cuban baptism would have been Angola and Nâgo if they were baptized in Brazil. In addition, categories like race also vary according to time and place.
In order to avoid becoming entangled in the ongoing debates over the meaning of these terms, the practice of BARDSS is to adhere as closely to the primary source as possible. Instead of construing African nation as a form of ethnic or linguistic identity, we leave the term as it is in the record and leave to historians the more difficult task of breaking down and understanding what these terms meant. BARDSS thus contributes to debate within the historical community over important questions of African identity and culture in the Americas not through not by interjecting our own interpretive framework, but by making thousands of new primary sources available for researchers to develop their own conclusions.
Age Category : In the documents, baptized individuals are generally either newborn children (infants) or adults. However, sometimes priests baptized an older child born years earlier. These broad age descriptors, Infant, Child, and Adult, are combined in a single category: Age Category.
Filiation : Adjectives used in baptismal records also frequently reveal if the child was born to married parents or out of wedlock. Children born to unmarried parents are referred to as “natural” offspring, while those born to a married couple are called “legitimate.” There are also many cases of children with “unknown parents.” These are orphans. We grouped these three attributes, Natural, Legitimate, and Orphan, within the category Filiation.
Legal Status : Baptized individuals are mainly divided between those who are free and those who are slaves. The category of “free” applies mainly to newborn individuals. We can impute their legal status as free, even when it is not mentioned explicitly in the documents, when we know that the mother is free. The mother’s legal status is always mentioned in the records. The legal status of an enslaved mother also reveals the legal position of her offspring--the children of enslaved mothers were, unless specified otherwise, slaves of the mother’s owner. On the other hand, baptized African adults are always slaves unless the record specifies him/her as an emancipado. Legal status became a more complex category during the 19th century as a result of the anti-slave trade campaign and the gradual abolition of slavery in different parts of the Americas. Emancipados were Africans aboard illicit slave ships captured by the British navy and landed in Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and other ports as nominally free people. BARDSS groups three attributes--Free, Enslaved, and Emancipado--into the category Legal Status. In the case of Emancipados, BARDSS records their ship and number which is information that is almost always present in the records.
Gender: We used the term Gender to refer to a single category containing “male” and “female.” The gender of individuals is clear not only from their names, but also (in the case of Romance-language documents) descriptive nouns and pronouns.
Relatives : The baptized person is not the only individual mentioned in the records. Because the records primarily describe the relationships between different people, it was important to find a relational way reflect those relationships the database. There are six categories of people, aside from the baptized individual, that make up a typical baptism record: the priest, godmother, godfather, mother, father, and, in the case of slaves, the owner. In order to avoid redundancies, and to better illustrate the complex interconnectivities among separate entries, BARDSS detaches categories who may appear frequently in the records from the individual baptized, making them independent variables. These include slave owners, priests, and churches. African nations, although not individuals, are also set up independently of the individual baptized, for the same reasons. In this way, the same owner, priest, church, or African nation can be connected to multiple individuals within a single baptismal entry, as well as from one entry to the next. This allows the system to show not only a set of data determined by its relationship to the individual baptized, but also by its relationship to a given slave owner, priest, or church.
In the majority of cases the mother of the infant was known. When the father’s paternity was recognized, baptismal records note him as well. The marital status of the parents is a relationship between the mother and father that does not relate directly to the baptized individual. Including the matrimonial bond between the two parents risks transforming a relatively simple, hierarchical data structure based on the relationships of different people to the baptized individual into a more complex system. Fortunately, the baptismal record itself contains an elegant solution to this problem, making the parents’ marriage an attribute of their child. When both the mother and father are listed, the document may indicate whether the parents were married, but not by describing them as husband and wife. Instead, the infant is referred to as either the “legitimate” or “natural” child of his or her parents. Therefore, this relationship becomes a question not of marriage, but of legitimacy or illegitimacy.
As indicated above, slave ownership is a relationship that can link multiple individuals to a single owner, who, like the priest performing the baptism, may appear frequently in the church’s records. When a priest baptized a slave, either as a newborn infant or as an older child or adult from Africa, he recorded the name of that slave’s owner. In the case of African slaves, this relationship is explicitly noted in the document. For newborn children, however, baptismal records note the owner of the mother instead of the infant. In the vast majority of cases, the child of a slave woman was the property of the mother’s owner, allowing us to impute the identity of the infant’s owner. However, there are some instances in which slave ownership is peripheral to the individual baptized. Often, the father and mother did not belong to the same owner, meaning that the father’s owner did not own the baptized individual. Godparents were often slaves themselves, and their owners are regularly mentioned in the documents. On rarer occasions, a baptismal entry notes that a third party, often the infant’s father, if he was a free man, had purchased the child’s freedom from the mother’s owner. Furthermore, individuals who owned many slaves appear repeatedly in the records, often multiple times within the same entry. In a plain database, this would mean the same individual could appear in fields dozens, or even hundreds of times, without any indication that the fields all referred to a single person
