archaeological and textual records - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell ...

“baptisms.” This is simply to try and distinguish the accounts of those who lived out
their lives as Catholic converts from the people who experienced “deathbed baptism.”
Moreover, as I will discuss later, deathbed baptisms varied from sick infants to adults
who were still cognizant enough to interact with the priest.
The missions to the Seneca may be the most historically complex of the Five
Nations, given that their territory was, during the time of the Jesuits, the most
geographically removed from European settlements (JR 55:73). Also, many of Seneca
villages consisted of “adopted” Huron and persons formerly of other groups (JR
54:79-81), and again when Chaumonot arrived, many Huron had already been exposed
or converted to Catholicism (JR 44:23-25). Beyond the previously discussed tactics
the missionaries employed to compel converts, the role that Huron Christians may
have played in spreading the faith (as the passage in JR 54:85 suggests) is certainly an
area where further research is needed.
The data on baptized and practicing Christian individuals is both incomplete
and unclear. The Jesuit Relations do not separate the numbers of existing Huron
Christians in certain villages from the numbers of new Seneca converts. Similarly, a
“parish register” that would give a count of practicing Christian families does not
appear to exist. Sometimes the Jesuit Relations distinguish those who died after
baptism from those who survived—but not always. Thus, without exact knowledge of
a given village’s population, it is hard to have a clear picture as to how many
Christians there were compared to the “non-converted.”
However, archaeology has yielded considerable insight regarding Seneca
settlement patterns. If we re-visit Vandrei, he suggests that each major village site
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