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Digital records from 19th Century give Black families a glimpse of their ancestry

Digital records from 19th Century give Black families a glimpse of their ancestry

Sep 17, 2021 2 mins, 11 secs

With her standard supply of popcorn and a beverage at her reach, Sewell-Smith clicked on, and learned that Hugh Short was a lawyer and owner of enslaved Black people.

A renowned genealogist, Sewell-Smith gathered much of the information through the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency for formerly enslaved Black people created near the end of the Civil War in 1865.

However, this month, the genealogy site Ancestry.com unveiled a Black family lineage game-changer — 3.5 million records of previously enslaved Black people, available for free.

It is believed to be the world’s largest digitized and searchable collection of Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedman’s Bank archives.

The collection has Black genealogists and habitual researchers thrilled because the descendants of the enslaved in America can learn more about their families in a far easier way.

“I am often haunted by something I read in one of the narratives of the formerly enslaved who remembered Black people just wandering the roads and trails after the Civil War looking for long-lost kin.

Further, the collection is significant because it is most likely the first time newly freed African Americans appear in records after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, as many enslaved people were previously excluded from standard census and federal documents.

“To see ancestors memorialized ...  there are documents within this collection where 100-year-old people are getting rations in 1865.

These were Black people who were reading and writing, or buying and selling land or sending their children to school.

“On my mother’s side of the family, from South Carolina, I found big sprawling plantations and fields and bills of sale, and families who are buying Africans off slave ships from Ghana and Mali and Senegal.

I found out about the Freedmen’s Bureau, through my mother’s ancestors, because those were the ancestors who were enslaved during the Civil War.”.

Those discoveries filled Richmond with pride, which he considers the value in Black people learning their family history.

Louis is writing a book about her family after gathering information from the Mississippi State Archives and the Freedmen’s Bureau.

“There’s not a day that I am not on the computer searching for my family and reading other records,” she said.

As an adult, she said, she began pursuing her family’s history in 1980, “viewing reel after reel of census records on microfilm.” She found the name of her great-great-grandfather on the 1870 federal census and later — through a Facebook group called Our Black Ancestry — learned that he was married Jan

“We need to be cognizant of the things our ancestors endured and how they persevered for us to even be here,” she said

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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