Virginia is leading the nation in a historic project that digitizes records of emancipated slaves, freed blacks and black Union soldiers, making them available to the public.
Gov. Tim Kaine announced the project Thursday while unveiling a national historic marker, denoting one of the first Richmond locations of the Freedmen’s Bureau at East 10th and Broad streets.
“You cannot overstate just how important this information is. For those pursuing African-American genealogy, this is the equivalent of Ellis Island putting all of their documents online.”
The Virginia records account for more than 300,000 scanned images. Many of these records have never been available before; others were, at best, difficult to access,” Kaine said.
The Virginia Freedmen Project is working to have more than 200 rolls of microfilm containing the files from the Freedmen Bureau between 1865 and 1872 scanned and cataloged.
The bureau was created by President Lincoln six months before his death to help “newly freed slaves be oriented back into a society that had not previously been theirs,” said Nedra Luke, a member of the Freedmen Project team.
“[The Freedmen Bureau] is the first attempt we made as a nation to apply the equality principle, articulated by the Founding Fathers, to all Americans,” said Roice Luke, a Virginia Commonwealth professor speaking on behalf of the Genealogical Society of Utah.
The bureau has files on marriages, ration receipts, labor contracts, diaries and letters from family members searching for each other, among other things, she said. The bureau was also integral in establishing many black colleges and other educational systems, she said.
The Genealogical Society of Utah will scan 150-year-old bureau records from all Southern states on more than 1,000 rolls of microfilm, which also hold the histories of poor whites.
The Virginia Freedmen Project volunteers with the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia will then assess Virginia’s digital records to pass on to Howard University, where they will be posted online.
“It is rich and dramatic first-person accounts of perceived wrongs and outright atrocities committed against many of these newly freed slaves,” said Kevin Hall, a Kaine spokesman, who called the records a “treasure trove of history.”
Virginia’s project is acting as a pilot for the next states to get their records online.
Opportunity
» Volunteers interested in participating in the Virginia Freedmen Project can call the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia at 804-780-9097.
