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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