African Americans can search for their lost ancestors by using the world's largest genealogical database that gives them the opportunity to search for the names of 1.8 million emancipated slaves.
The successes of the Freedman's Bureau that were initiated by Abraham Lincoln back in 1865 and administered initially under Oliver Howard's War Department are notable considering the intense popular and political opposition to the agency. The Bureau was sometimes a hostile entity to the people it was meant to help and protect—particularly the former slaves, as well as poor whites devastated by the war. After many years of violence, the Freedman's Bureau was officially dissolved in 1872.
In the first few years after emancipation, though, the Bureau built several hospitals and more than a thousand rural schools, established the Historically Black College and the University system, and created millions of records with the names of former slaves and Southern white refugees, according to NMAAHC (National Museum of African American History and Culture). These records have helped historians reconstruct the lives of people who may otherwise have disappeared from the record and helped genealogists trace relatives who might have been irrevocably broken.
These records have become part of a digitization project. The Freedman's Bureau Project and FamilySearch enables African Americans to recover their family history in a database which now includes the names of approximately 1.8 million individuals recorded by Freedman's Bureau workers and entered by Freedman's Bureau Project volunteers 150 years later. The database will give millions of people descended from both former slaves and white Civil War refugees the ability to find their ancestors.
In collaboration with the NMAAHC, the Smithsonian Transcription Center is now relying on volunteers to transcribe all of the digital scans provided by FamilySearch.
While the Smithsonian's transcription project is underway, people who want to learn more can visit the Freedman's Bureau Online, which has transcribed hundreds of documents, including labor records, narratives of "outrages committed on freedmen," and marriage registers.
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