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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