Case by case, decade by decade, Edward C. Esau is meticulously indexing Natchez history.

As director of the Adams County Courthouse Records Project at the Historic Natchez Foundation, Esau is making living documents out of what could have remained forgotten pages in neglected old books and ledgers.

This week, Esau will share his work with participants at the Historic Natchez Conference, which opens at 2 p.m. today at the Natchez Eola Hotel.

Esau will speak at 9 a.m. Friday, telling about the work he has done on court dockets, chattel mortgages, land deeds, circuit court minutes and “all kinds of records for looking back into the period,” he said.

None of Esau’s recent work would have been possible without the earlier work of students from Dr. Ronald L.F. Davis’ history classes at California State University in Northridge.

Beginning in the early 1990s, students began to rescue endangered record books from the basement of the courthouse, removing them to the Historic Natchez Foundation, carefully cleaning them and storing them in archival paper and boxes.

“I understand there later was a flood in the basement where the records had been stored,” Esau said. “They would have been ruined.”

What is the importance of the records? A look at the categories used in the indexing provides a clue.

Categories of information include African-American, banking, agriculture, children, commerce, craftsmen, crime, debt, divorce, estate, family, land, law, leases, liens, transportation, violence, women and other subjects.

“The court records are fascinating. There is so much detail,” Esau said. “I get to see every week some things historians will see only once in a lifetime.”

With every detail, a new discussion of the past ensues. “And the more discussion, the more the voice of the past can be heard,” Esau said.

“Some documents probably have not been out of the boxes since they were first put there.”

Documents range from late 18th century to early 20th. “The earliest case I know of is 1796,” Esau said.

Fascinating details abound. Among those most compelling for Esau, however, are the habeas corpus cases involving attempts by African Americans to gain their freedom.

In his Friday presentation, Esau will tell the poignant story of a free black couple from Baltimore.

“They were in their mid-20s,” Esau said. “They were just starting out in life. A person from North Carolina asked them to come work for him for a dollar a day.”

The couple agreed. Then after six days their employer “marched them to the slave market.”

They ended up in Natchez, where they tried to prove their free status. The document arrived that would have proven their case. But they could not pay the necessary bond. The case was dismissed.

“The detailed stories tell you so much about what was going on in antebellum Natchez,” Esau said. “Some things you would think are literally made up. These things raise questions about what was really going on in Natchez at this time.”

With all of the years invested in saving and preserving the records, more records remain to be processed — and then indexed.

The pre-Civil War period is the focus for indexing now. Records up to the 1880s are cleaned and stored in acid-free boxes.

The indexes are available to researchers in two programs, one a Microsoft program, the other a Macintosh. Financial and other help has come from the National Park Service and Mississippi Department of Archives and History as well as from California State, among other agencies and institutions.

“We have 23,000 individual court cases indexed now,” Esau said. “That means tens of thousands of names and subjects.”

Esau has worked fulltime on the records at the Historic Natchez Foundation for more than two years, but his association with the records began years before when he came as a California State student.

A California native, Esau is an ordained minister and an accomplished historian. After serving for a short while for a youth minister, he went back to his first love, history, and combined his background in religion with his historical research.

A candidate for a Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Riverside, Esau holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from California State, Northridge.