Finished at Last...

My mother, Mrs John Landry Morrison, compiled an index of early marriages of Pointe Coupee Parish and published the index in the early 1970s. She has since past on. She did a great service in that these records go back to pre-Revolutionary War days and they were recorded in the language of the moment - French, English and Spanish. So she had to interpret the writings, all in individual script and sometimes names were spelled different on succeeding pages. She tried to hold true to the spelling, even if it is in error. And some names have changed over time, for instance in French Etienne is Stephen in English.

She took her findings home, translated them to today's English, and typed them up by hand. There was no such thing as a word processor in that day, at least not available to her. The pages were then given to Claitor's Books in Baton Rouge who published the book. There were no galleys, no proofing, just Xeroxing of the original, setting up the press and binding the book. Mama advertised the book in the DAR house organ and was surprised that she went through three printings of the book. She sold it that way and in the end not expecting to make money, did indeed make a small profit from her endeavor.

She gave a copy to the Louisiana State Library and a copy to the LSU Library. I checked and both repositories have copies. She also gave a copy to the Pointe Coupee Library but I do not have an easy way to check their card catalog. Since my Aunt was librarian at that time, I am sure it is there. However, I can not find a copyright on the original works so will attempt to copyright the work I have done.

I took her book and typed it into MicroSoft Word, keeping with her page numbers. I copied her foreword and added one of my own. I found many errors and corrected them. But I held true to her edict about spelling of names unless there was a severe disconnect, like what was in the index and was in body of the text - a direct reference. And she had typos since it was all done by hand on a portable typewriter.

I will give copies to my sister and my brother's children. It is there intellectual property to now days. I will use MicroSoft to lock up the book but that does not prevent someone from copying the book and reformatting it. I thought about putting it in Adobe, but again, that does not prevent someone from copying the document and reproducing it. So I think I may have to copyright the disk and hope for the best.

It took me about nine months to do. I quit for awhile, it gets sort of boring, doing a lot of repetitious work. But I finally got her done.

When I get the copyright, I intend to advertise the book in the DAR house magazine. Then I can mail out a disk to buyer for him or her to use.

This whole endeavor got started because I was perusing the Pointe Coupee Parish genealogy web page and noted no mention of my mother's works. I enquired as to why not and the response I got was it was not in electronic or digital format. That made me angry, since a lot of valuable research was being skipped because it required a little elbow grease. Then I decided if they were willing to pay for it, I would put it in a digital format for them to use. But they will have to pay for it.