Aims and objectives
The project aims to digitise notarial manuscripts located in The Historical Archive of Cartagena de Indias. The notarial documents date from the 19th century. These documents are of crucial importance for the historical memory of a significant city in the Colombian Caribbean. Its preservation implies not only the possibility of the inclusion of peoples that were previously silenced by official historical discourses, but also the construction of a national memory sponsored in part by the creation of notaries as spaces for the foundation of a legal order based on a official language that mediated daily life in the nascent republics.
Outcomes
The project digitised notarial documents from 1853-1900 corresponding to the First Notary Office of Cartagena and notarial documents from 1859-1861 corresponding to the Notary Public of the Municipality of El Carmen de Bolívar; such documents are found in the Historical Archive of Cartagena de Indias, an administrative unit of the Historical Museum of the same city. The digitised material accounts for the social history of both the city of Cartagena de Indias and the Municipality of El Carmen de Bolívar, addressing aspects related to economic life (trade, formation of commercial companies, purchase-sale of possessions and rural properties and urban, production and marketing of tobacco, public administrative contracts, mortgages, among others), as well as characteristics of social, public and private life (civil marriages, successions of post-mortuary assets, appraisals, wills), both in rural and urban areas.
The records copied by this project have been catalogued as:
- EAP1212/1 Archivo Historico de Cartagena (1853-1900)
Due to the cyber-attack on the British Library in October 2023, the archives and manuscripts database is currently inaccessible and we are unable to provide links to the catalogue records for this project.
