Florida Colonial Records

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Colonial Records

History

In 1565, Spain established the presidio of Saint Augustine, the first permanent European settlement. Saint Augustine was burned by the English in 1586, another major settlement was not established in Florida until 1698. The territory of Florida originally included Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Florida was ceded to the English in 1763 and divided into West and East Florida. Florida was returned to Spain in 1784. Some of West Florida was annexed to the territories of Louisiana and Mississippi in 1812. The remainder of Florida was ceded to the United States in 1819.

Civil Records and Sources

Spanish Dominion

Spanish colonial government records of Florida can be found in several different locations.

• Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain: Papeles de Cuba and Papeles de Santo Domingo.
• Mitchell Library, Louisiana state University in Baton Rouge (Copies of Cuban papers).
• Tilton Library, Tulane University, New Orleans (copies of Cuban papers).
• Loyola University Library, New Orleans (copies of Santo Domingo papers).
• Pace Library, University of West Florida, Pensacola (copies of Cuban papers and Panton Leslie Papers, 1738-1853, on microfilm).
• Archivo General de Cuba in Havana.
• Saint Augustine Historical Society (copies of records from Havana).
• Mississippi State Archives in Jackson (Spanish series, Provincial Archives).
• Spanish land grant archives, 1764-1844 (film 1020288 ff.).
• The P.K. Yonge Library, University of Florida, in Gainesville.

Records for Spanish East Florida (1783-1821), are located at the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. A card index is available as well as the original records on microfilm. For more information see "The East Florida Papers in the Library of Congress," by Mabel W. Manning, in Hispanic American Historical Review X No. 3 (August 1930), 392-7.

• Spanish Florida land records, 1764-1849, United States Board of Land Commissioners. The originals of these records are at the Florida State Archives in Tallahassee.
• Colonial Records of Spanish Florida [1750-1580] by Jeanette Thurber Connor, (DeLand: Florida State Historical Society, 1925-1930).
• Spanish Plat Book of Land Records of the District of Pensacola, Province of West Florida, British and Spanish Land Grants, 1763-1821, by Billie Ford Snider, (1895, reprint, Pensacola: Antique Compiling, 1994).
• Index to the Archives of Spanish West Florida, 1782-1810, by Stanely Clisby Arthur, (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1975).

Additional Reading

• The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest by Herbert E. Bolton, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921).
• Catalog of the Florida State Archives (Tallahassee: Department of State, 1975).
• Catalog of the P.K. Younge Library of Florida History, 4 Vols., (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1977). For a link to the library website is here.
• The Spanish Censuses of Pensacola, 1784-1820: Genealogical Guide to Spanish Pensacola by William S. Coker and Douglas Ingles, (Pensacola: Perdido Bay Press, 1980).
• British West Florida, 1763-1769 by Cecil Johnson, (New haven: Yale University Press, 1943).
• The British Development of West Florida, 1763-1769 by Clinton N. Howard, (Salt Lake City, Utah : Digitized by FamilySearch International, 2015).
• East Florida as a British Province, 1763-1784 by Charles L. Mowatt, (Berkeley: university of California Press, 1943).
• New Smyrna, an Eighteenth Century Greek Odyssey by E.P. Panagopoulos, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1967).
• "The Loyalist Migration from East Florida to the Bahama Islands" by Thelma Peters, Florida Historical Society Quarterly 40:226-40.
• Eighteenth-Century Florida and the Caribbean by Samuel Proctor, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1976).
• The Italians in Colonial Florida: A Repertory of Italian Families Settled in Florida under the Spanish and British Regimes; with a Brief Historical Outline and an Appendix on the Contemporary Colonial Press by Bruno Roselli, (Miami: n.p., 1940, film 1035661).
• A Bibliography of West Florida by James Servies, 4 Vols., (Pensacola: John C. Pace Library, 1981-).
• Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785 by Wilbur Henry Siebert, 2 Vols., (Deland: Florida State Historical Society, 1929).
• A History of Florida by Charlton Tebeau, (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971).
• The Governorship of Spanish Florida, 1700-1763 by John Jay TePaske, (Durham: Duke university Press, 1964).