Want to know a great way to find out about the lives of your enslaved ancestors after the end of the War? The narrative reports of the Freedmens Bureau. I have discussed the Bureau records numerous times in this blog. They are a critical resource for the tumultuous five years between 1865 and 1870. Genealogists […]
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Category: Online Research
Dating Family Photographs
I have been interested for a long time in vintage pictures of African-American families, whether they are related to me or not. There’s just something about seeing a picture of someone who we know mostly through the census and vital and the other sources in genealogy. DuBois understood the power of images when he assembled a […]
Finding State Laws About Slaves and Free...
Finding state laws about slaves and free blacks has always been a complicated process. If you’re the typical genealogist like me, you didn’t have easy access to expensive databases. You had to visit a law library and search each year’s laws. You could also try to do that online. I promise you it was no fun. […]
Searching Ancestry Databases: Things You...
Since Ancestry remains the primary website for genealogy research, I’d like to share a few tips for researching its databases. For the first example, I’ll use the marriage database below called Maryland Compiled Marriages, 1667-1899: We Must Know the Source Typically, we put the names of our ancestors in the search box. If the search came up empty, we might conclude […]
Researching Soldiers in World War I
My great-grandfather Lawson Holt served in the Army during World War I. Like most, his were among the records destroyed during the infamous 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center. This post shows how it is possible to still find out more information about your ancestor’s military service, even though those files are gone. […]
Freedmen’s Bureau Record Uncovers Likely
I made a big discovery recently courtesy of Familysearch’s newly indexed Freedmen’s Bureau Labor Contracts. A Little Background Several years ago, I used cluster research to trace my Tennessee ancestor Mike Fendricks back to his Alabama roots. At a standstill with Mike, I traced the roots of Dee Suggs, a man Mike lived with in […]
The Ku Klux Klan Hearings
In 1871, the U.S. Government held hearings on the rampant violence in the South by the Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist organizations. The official name of these records is the “Report of the Joint Select Committee Appointed to Inquire Into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States.” However, they are often referred […]
Perry Simpson Found in Freedmen’s Bureau
Finally- I found a needle in a haystack. I found my 4th great-grandfather, Perry Simpson, in Freedmen’s Bureau records! I have probably looked through thousands of pages of these records through the years and that is no exaggeration. I found his name in a Register of Letters Received in the Field Office Records for Maryland […]
Genealogy Resource Recommendations
I’ve talked before on this blog about the importance of reading genealogical books in order to learn about how to use various record sets. I want to highlight two of the best resources for genealogical research that some of you may be unaware of. The book “The Source” has been a mainstay of genealogists since […]
Researching U.S. Colored Troops
For many years now, I’ve been interested in researching U.S. Colored Troops who served in Union forces from the communities where my family lived. Almost 200,000 black people, slaves and free blacks, served in the Union Army and Navy. The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation began the process of large-scale recruitment of black men into the service as […]