Their number, increased by the local enslaved people at their service, was growing; as a result, they constituted a growing proportion of the region's population. During the second half of the nineteenth century, they constituted their own distinct and practically endogamous society. Its identity was also reproduced through religion - they were Catholic, for the most part, despite mixing with voodoo cults - and schooling. Élisée Reclus notes in his 1887 work that 'in [Agudá] families of colour, consanguineous marriages, even among brothers and sisters by different mothers, are very common and not frowned upon' (cited by Verger, 1953, p. 12). Of de Souza's 20 daughters, as listed by de Souza (1992), eleven were wedded to Agudás, either by first or second marriage, and there were several cases of consanguinity: four daughters married their uncles or cousins, three married their nephews, seven married their brothers and there was one union between father and daughter. In the work Relation sur l'établissement des missions dans le vicariat apostolique du Dabomey, found in Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, vol. 36, Lyon, 1864, p. 439, cited by Verger, 1968, p. 601), Father Francesco Borghero, a superior of the Apostolic Vicariate of Dahomey noted that Agudá boys and girls attended the Catholic Mission of Lyon school, where they learned to read and write in Portuguese. The subjects of Abomey, however, were forbidden from frequenting its classrooms.