Act #71 of the 1908 Louisiana Legislature provided for the enumeration of all ex-Confederate soldiers and the widows of deceased soldiers residing in each parish of the state. The enumeration was to include the name, age, state of enlistment, regiment & company in which served, kind & amount of property owned, occupation, and physical infirmity of each (though the act did not require it, the forms prepared for the enumeration by the State Auditor of Public Accounts also included a space for date of marriage, to be entered for all widows).

The enumeration was to be made by the Assessor of each parish in the state at the same time that he made his enumeration of educable children. The count was to be repeated every four years thereafter. Each assessor was to forward copies of the enumeration to the clerk of court in his parish, to the clerk of Civil District Court in Orleans Parish, and to the State Auditor.

Volumes for Orleans Parish and eighteen other parishes are present in the Civil Courts Collection. There are nine books for Orleans and single volumes for Acadia, Ascension, Cameron, Catahoula, Concordia, Grant, Jefferson, Lafayette, Lincoln, Livingston, Morehouse, St. Bernard, St. Helena, Tangipahoa, Tensas, Vernon, Webster and West Feliciana Parishes. The volumes are dated 1911. We have no records for later enumerations (the law requiring new counts every four years may well have been repealed sometime after 1911).

Records for additional parishes MAY be housed in the individual parish courthouses. We know from the inventory of the Natchitoches Parish court house prepared by the Historical Records Survey in 1938 that the volume for that parish was in the parish archives at that time. The HRS survey for St. Bernard Parish does not list the local enumeration for that parish.

The records are also available on microfilm (VT 840 1911).