EJL
EMMA-JANE MACKINNON-LEEWorking notes · Paris
WORKING NOTESFrom the Notary's Table
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Working notes from the translator's table

A small sample of working notes kept while reading French Antillean notarial acts against their English translations, Caribbean compensation schedules and the British and Highland family records they later pass into. The notes are kept for the working files first; they are published here as they are, with the source archive and date noted.

Note №01ANOM, Aix-en-Provence2026-05-22Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee reviewing French colonial estate documents during a translation session in Paris

Tenir, Posséder, Jouir: One French Verb, One English Silence

The clearest reading of a French Antillean estate transfer is still the notary's own hand, but the printed English version is the one that travels. In four estate transfers in Martinique notarised between 1762 and 1791 — two in Saint-Pierre, two in Fort-Royal — the standard formula tenir, posséder et jouir runs through all the drafts. To hold, to possess, to enjoy. In each English translation prepared later for an inheriting branch in Scotland and in Ulster, the middle verb falls away. To hold and to enjoy. It looks like a small editorial smoothing, the kind a careful translator might prefer, but the missing verb is the one that records possession as a distinct act, separate from the more ambiguous enjoyment of fruits. Half a century later, when the British compensation schedules ask who possessed the estate at emancipation, the missing verb is the absence that lets a more confident claim be written. The note that follows lays the four French drafts and the four English translations side by side, in the order they were issued, and tracks how the same shift travels into the parish entries and the family pedigree.

Note №02Saint-Pierre notarial drafts, 17892026-05-18Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee, France-based archival researcher and translator, portrait among ledgers and folios

The Pélagie Spelling: Three Drafts, One Estate

Marie-Louise Pélagie appears in three successive notarial drafts on a single estate transfer in Saint-Pierre in the spring of 1789. In the first draft her name is written Pélagie, with the acute accent; in the second, Pelagie, without; in the third, Pellégie, a spelling closer to how the name is later transcribed in a Scottish family Bible held in Inverness. The notary is the same, the witnesses are the same, the date is the same. Read together, the three drafts give us not three women but one, and they also give us a small lesson on what the orthography of a single name can do to a much later compensation claim. When the same person appears under the third spelling in a Highland family settlement of 1834, the variant is read as a different individual, and the line of descent is allowed to skip a generation. The working note keeps the three drafts in the order of issue, with photographs of each, and proposes a single concordance entry for the Pélagie line.

Note №03Notarial acts before the 1902 eruption2026-05-12Candid working portrait of Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee with Caribbean land records on her desk

Saint-Pierre Before the Mountain

Most of what is now read as the notarial archive of nineteenth-century Saint-Pierre was already in print or in private hands when the mountain came down in May 1902. Some of the most important drafts were lost; some survive in copies made for metropolitan owners, kept now at ANOM in Aix-en-Provence; some survive only as references in later inventories drawn up for litigation. A translator working with this material is constantly weighing what is present, what is referred to, and what is reconstructed from later abstracts. The note collects the diplomatic shapes of the surviving drafts and registered copies, and offers a small grammar of how to read a Saint-Pierre notarial act when it is no longer attached to its protocol. It also catalogues the most common kinds of secondary citation found in twentieth-century lawsuits over Martinican estates, where a phrase like 'as appears by the act passed before maître X on the such-and-such of such-a-year, in his protocol' often turns out to be the only surviving trace of an instrument that the mountain has otherwise erased.

Note №04Le Lamentin plantation registers, 1820 — 18442026-05-06Candid portrait of Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee at a table of French colonial deeds during a translation pass

Atelier and Gang: Two Words for the Same Workforce

Atelier is the standard French Antillean term for the enslaved workforce attached to an habitation. It carries an older workshop sense, with implications of training, age categories and skill that English drafts often resolve as 'gang' or 'hands'. In a sequence of Le Lamentin plantation registers between 1820 and 1844, the atelier is regularly subdivided — grand atelier, petit atelier, atelier de la sucrerie, atelier domestique — and the subdivisions appear in the registers as named lists. In the English translations prepared for a Glasgow merchant house holding part of the same estate, the subdivisions collapse into a single line item labelled 'gang'. The note assembles the parallel passages and asks what the working register does that the merchant abstract does not, and where a translator's working glossary should hold the French term unresolved.

Note №05Le Marin cadastre, partial survey2026-04-29Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee reading a French Antillean marriage settlement folio for translation

Cadastre Fragments: Reading the Boundaries Twice

The Le Marin cadastre survives in fragments, with whole sections of the survey lost between the original drawing in the mid-nineteenth century and the surviving copies now consulted in Fort-de-France. Where two fragments overlap, the boundaries do not always agree. A small parcel on the eastern edge of one estate appears in one fragment as belonging to the neighbouring habitation, and in the next as belonging to the estate it abuts. The translator reading these fragments for a litigation file is asked to render the boundary description twice, once in each version, and to leave the discrepancy visible in the English translation rather than smooth it over. The note records the form of presentation used in three recent commissions, and proposes a small convention for marking cadastre disagreements in bilingual editions.

Note №06Antigua and Guadeloupe compensation claims, 1834 — 18492026-04-19Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee reading succession papers from a Caribbean estate at her Paris desk

The Compensation Year That Wasn't

A claim for compensation lodged in 1838 for the labour of enslaved people on an Antiguan estate references a French Antillean parallel — the abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848 — that, at the date of the claim, has not yet happened. The reference is to a draft decree circulating in Paris in the late 1830s, prepared by the same circles that would shape the eventual law of 27 April 1848. The note follows the path of that draft as it appears, by quotation, in an English-language compensation claim ten years before it became French law, and proposes that the claim is best understood as an attempt to anticipate a second round of compensation that the British family expected to be eligible for in France. The bilingual edition of the claim, with the relevant French passages identified, runs as an appendix to the note.

Correspondence

Working files behind any of the notes can be requested by writing to [email protected]. Photographs of the relevant folios are kept with the bilingual transcripts.