Familysearch released three more sets of Freedmens Bureau Field Office records recently.Now, the Bureau field office records for all southern states are online, free for viewing! Sign in at Familysearch.org, click on “Browse the records,” and then type “Freedmen” in the search box and the links for each state will appear. I cannot overemphasize how valuable […]
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Tag: Reconstruction
Freedmens Bureau Labor Contracts
Familysearch is quickly digitizing Freedmens Bureau Records. Labor Contracts are one of the first categories of records that researchers should search within these valuable records. I posted awhile ago a suggested process to follow while searching these exasperating records. Background and Importance Labor Contracts are very valuable because they were often made between slaveowners and their former enslaved […]
Voter Registration Records
The challenge to find the last slaveowner for those researching African-American ancestry can be daunting. We need to trace our lines back as close to emancipation as possible. That means the 1870 population census is a critical document. If you can’t locate your ancestors in 1870, you can use other documents to record their presence in […]
The Terror of Reconstruction
The image above is a famous Thomas Nast drawing illustrating Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Freedmens Bureau in 1866. It shows him kicking the “Bureau” and little black people falling out. The drawing may be a funny caricature, but what black people were experiencing was no laughing matter. Violence: The Order of the Day Often […]