Welcome to the Early California Population Project (ECPP), a reference database and research project that explores the lives of more than 100,000 individuals who appear in the sacramental records created by California’s Franciscan missionaries between 1769 and 1850. Through a partnership between the University of California, Riverside and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, the database provides public access to all the information contained in the California mission registers, records that are of unique and vital importance to the study of the people and communities of Native California, the pobladores of Alta California’s presidios and pueblos, and the earliest Anglo-American settlers who came to California. The baptism, marriage and burial records provided here contain a wealth of information on tens of thousands of Native Americans, soldiers and settlers who lived in Spanish and Mexican California.
The ECPP encompasses records from all 21 California missions as well as the Los Angeles Plaza Church and the Santa Barbara Presidio. It contains information culled from 104,000 baptisms, 28,000 marriages and 72,000 burials performed in California between 1769 and 1850 as well as cross references and links between individuals’ baptism, marriage, and burial records.
Whether you are an academic researcher, a family historian, or a descendant of the California missions or the settler communities of California here you will have access to all recorded births, marriages and deaths from the twenty-one missions operating in Alta California from 1769 to 1850.
The ECCP 1.0 went online in 2006. In 2022 the database was redesigned, simplified, reconfigured, and transferred to a sustainable and updated server at UCR in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS). With the advent of ECPP 1.1, UCR CHASS IT oversees database maintenance, operability, and sustainability whereas The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens remains responsible for user queries.
Because ECPP 1.1 contains information stored in multiple tables and organized into some 225 fields the database is best used alongside the newly revised Guide to Users.
NOTE: Data in ECPP 1.1 may be used for personal and noncommercial purposes only. Reports, presentations, publications or websites that rely upon the database must cite the ECPP 1.1 as follows: The Early California Population Project. Edition 1.1. General Editor, Steven W. Hackel (University of California, Riverside and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California, 2022).
The development of ECPP 1.0 at the The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens was made possible through major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the State Library LTSA Grant Program funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and a start-up grant from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. Additional support for ECPP 1.0 was provided by the Dan Murphy Foundation and the Giles W. & Elise G. Mead Foundation. The creation of ECPP 1.1 would not have been possible without the generous support of UCR’s Rupert and Jeanette Henry Costo Endowment in American Indian Affairs.