How can these records be accessed online - what's the URL?
thanks,
Ray
Alyson L. Taylor-White wrote:
> Virginia's Freedmen Bureau Records Are Available Online
> ~ Virginia will also take the lead in a historically significant
> “Finding the Freedmen Marriage Records Project” ~
>
> RICHMOND – Governor Timothy M. Kaine today announced that the historic
> Virginia Freedmen’s Bureau records, the earliest major compilation of
> information on the African-American community, have been extracted and
> indexed, and are now available online to historians and family history
> researchers. Under the direction of the Black History Museum and
> Cultural Center of Virginia and in collaboration with FamilySearch,
> volunteers digitized the records of names, marriages, educational
> pursuits, work contracts, health care and legal services and other
> important information from the Virginia Freedmen’s Bureau. The records
> can now be viewed temporarily at the FamilySearch website, and
> negotiations are currently ongoing to permanently host the records
> through the Smithsonian Institution‘s National Museum of African
> American History and Culture.
>
> “This project is exciting for Virginia and for the world,” Governor
> Kaine said. “What we have done is helped preserve the legacy of those
> nearly four million freedmen who at the end of the Civil War stepped
> out of slavery and into freedom.”
>
> In October 2006, Governor Kaine announced that Virginia would be the
> first state to participate in a historic project to index and digitize
> the Freedmen’s Bureau records, allowing historians and descendents of
> emancipated slaves, freed Blacks and Black Union soldiers to access
> historical data, much of which was never before available.
> Participation in this historically significant project, as well as
> collaboration with key national organizations, continues Virginia’s
> prominent role in preserving America’s history and legacies.
>
> Building on Virginia’s trailblazing effort, the project now moves to
> the remaining states in which the Freedmen’s Bureau had established
> headquarters. FamilySearch, which initiated this project at the
> request of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA),
> will provide direct administrative support for this important second
> phase of the freedmen project.
>
> The Governor also announced that the Black History Museum and Cultural
> Center of Virginia will continue to play a leading role in helping to
> ensure that all of the freedmen records—Freedmen’s Bureau, Freedman’s
> Bank, and other Freedmen records not included in the NARA archives—
> are brought together into one place and made accessible to the public.
> To this end, the Museum will be involved in three important,
> freedmen-related projects:
>
> • Collaboration with FamilySearch and other national organizations
> to encourage African-American participation in the second phase of the
> freedmen records extraction and indexing project;
>
> • Collaboration with other national organizations in an effort to
> identify the freedmen marriage records that remain in the counties,
> libraries and other locations throughout the South; a blue ribbon
> coordinating committee will be appointed to plan, seek funding for,
> and oversee this project;
>
> • In partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, develop an
> educational program that highlights the role played by three
> historically significant record sets – the freedmen records, the 1870
> census, and the 1880 census – in documenting and identifying the
> freedmen as they emerged from slavery at the end of the Civil War.
>
> “The digitization of information from the freedmen records will
> greatly aid students of history and genealogy in better understanding
> the freedmen era, commonly known by historians as Reconstruction,”
> said Dr. Maureen Elgersman Lee, Executive Director of the Black
> History Museum.
>
> “We thank the Black History Museum and its volunteers for their
> prodigious efforts on behalf of the freedmen,” said Alan Heath of
> FamilySearch. “Those volunteers spent countless hours, sitting at
> their computers, extracting name by name, place by place America’s
> history from the ragged pages of the past.”
>
> “These records are clearly among the most important American
> historical records yet to become accessible to the family history and
> scholarly communities,” said Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the
> Smithsonian Institution‘s National Museum of African American History
> and Culture.
>
> The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands,
> commonly called the Freedmen's Bureau, was established by the U.S.
> Congress in 1865 to assist refugees and freedmen following the Civil
> War and Emancipation Proclamation. The Bureau sought to establish
> systems of education, health care and opportunity to support recently
> emancipated African-Americans until it’s dissolution in 1872.
>
> July 9, 2009
>
> Alyson Taylor-White
> Virginia Review Editor
>
>
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--
Ray Bonis
Special Collections and Archives
James Branch Cabell Library
VCU Libraries
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804-828-1108
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