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The collection consists of copies of official letters and court records relative to Spanish colonial affairs in the Southeast
(especially Georgia). The letters consist of correspondence between army officers or local officials stationed in Georgia
and Florida, and their superiors in Spain and deal with petitions and reports of work and contain valuable historical and
ethnological information on Spanish relations with the Indians and the English and on the country in general. The court records
deal largely with the testimony of soldiers who accompanied early Spanish expeditions. Usually they were called for to support
new exploratory projects from Spain, or to settle responsibility of adverse military incidents in Georgia. There is no English
edition of these documents, but Lanning refers to many of them in his book Spanish Missions of Georgia, and John Swanton translated
several in his United States Bureau of Ethnology (USBAE) bulletin Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors.
Several of the documents were translated at various times and by various people. The translations were located in the Archaeology
Department of the University of Georgia in 1940, but the University of Georgia Libraries do not have the translations. The
Libraries do have translations of some of the documents and letters, done by Miss Raquel van der Pall, a graduate student
assistant in Special Collections in 1955. These translations are in folders 1 and 2 labeled "Van der Pall Translations."
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