Fantastic Find: Mapping the Freedmen's Bureau

Some notices concerning the Freedman's Bureau in The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, South Carolina), 17 Aug 1865, pg 1, col 3; digital image, accessed from Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84027008/1865-08-17/ed-1/seq-1/) on 2 Oct 2015.  An interesting history of this newspaper here.

The federal agency Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, AKA Freedmen's Bureau***, was created in 1865 to help freed slaves and poor whites.  Many records were generated from this short-lived agency, providing amazingly detailed information for anyone doing African American genealogy.  The records have been available publicly for a while now, but the process of learning how to use the records is somewhat daunting.

Toni Carrier and Angela Walton-Raji have created a site, Mapping the Freedmen's Bureau, which takes most of the tedious steps out of researching previously enslaved ancestors by displaying records sets (Freedman's Bureau Offices, Freedman's Bank Branches, and Freedman's Bureau Hospitals) by location, and providing links to the relevant records in scanned FamilySearch.



Hat tip to Sunny at Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems.


*** More info on Freedman's Bureau at FamilySearch, the National Archives, Ancestry's Wiki, and Wikipedia.








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