Freedmen's Bureau Records on Ancestry 2021

hey today is an extra special video because we just couldn't wait to get this out we're talking about the new release from ancestry of the friedman's bureau records now everyone should know about these records okay and they are free for everyone to access regardless of your subscription status however you do need to have at least a free guest account to sign into so that you can access these records now if you are not familiar with these records they were created post-civil war to help assist enslaved persons free persons of color poor whites all to help rebuild their uh lives after the civil war ended now these records contain some of our only records for some of our black ancestors but also contain many white ancestors as well so everyone should be aware at how valuable these records really are these are the friedman bureau records and the friedman bank records and are now available on ancestry and have an every name index so this you know before we had to scroll through every page this index is fabulous okay now before we go any further let me introduce myself my name is connie knox i am a lifelong genealogist here to help you go further faster and factually with your family history research don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell so that you get notified each time i upload a video genealogy tv has a website a newsletter and a facebook page links for all of that are in the show notes below now there is a handout for this episode as well that is for the information access level channel members you can join channel membership by hitting the join button you can also find them at genealogytv.org this is a footnotes episode and i like to call them footnotes because it's in the footnotes where the real sources are and today's real source she's an expert in this area and so her name is nika suelle smith she is a professional photographer speaker host consultant she is a documentarian and has more than 20 years of experience as a genealogist she has extensive experience in african ancestry genealogy and reverse genealogy and is an expert at genealogical research in the northeastern part of louisiana now she is also i'm telling you phenomenal at researching enslaved communities all right now i had the good fortune to talk to her earlier today and if you are not familiar with nika oh boy you are in for a treat so let's go check it out [Music] nika it is i'm so happy you were here this is really exciting stuff i can't wait to tell the audience about it um and thank you for joining us today to help us understand a little bit more about the friedman bureau records right thank you yeah it this is an exciting time in um in the in the life of genealogy especially uh for those of us that research really in the deep south um in particular african american uh genealogists and family history uh researchers because this collection is really for a lot of folks the first time they're seeing their ancestors on paper as free people um because of the dates that the bureau covers you know you you have the the creation of the bureau in you know uh 1865 uh the bureau is created in the same act the bank is created which more people may have heard about the freedmen's bank um and and with it you have folks moving into their lives as free people and and making decisions for themselves and for their families and in some instances these decisions and choices you know could change the trajectory of a family line i mean very easily very simply and so um you know to to have all these names you know to have the 3.5 million records in the collection you know available in the world's largest digitized and searchable iteration of the freedmen's bureau is is something that again it's it's something it's something to be glad that we're living to see just to be clear for those who have never heard and i know there's quite a few people probably never heard of the freedmen bureau records or the friedman bank records let's just explain the era and exactly what they are right right so for the freedmen's bureau the majority of the collection is from 1875 to about 1870 uh 18 i'm sorry 1865 to 1872 but there are some locations within the country that predate this in fact where my family is from you know an area that um almost at time forgotten some instances it's sad but um the mississippi delta in in fact is one of the areas in the country um you're talking louisiana mississippi side arkansas side even tennessee side that area has early coverage in the freedmen's bureau in fact they have or you know organizations before that predate the bureau that have documentation that start in 1862 1863 in some cases even when you're in locations like south carolina and which that also folds in georgia and florida as well some of those records and even in virginia predate the actual establishment of the bureau so we're talking you know end of the civil war we're talking right after the passage of the 13th amendment which abolished slavery except in the instance of punishment for a crime you're talking about a a war-torn country you know oftentimes people don't really i think think about the fact that our country was in the upheaval we were fighting against each other there was large-scale um famine people were starving um there were folks who were you know just so destitute and really dependent on our government to step up and to help and and not just those who were formerly enslaved within this collection as well you're going to see poor whites mentioned um and receiving services as well as free people of color and so you've got all this upheaval you've got the union troops in locations you know where where they are taking um or have taken control of these areas you know spots like new orleans and you know even my little you know small enclave where my family's from the union troops were there in fact uh ulysses s grant tried to build a a channel going from the mississippi river to a lake in the area to hide gun boats for the battle of vicksburg so the union troops were literally in carroll parish or east carol paris louisiana so you have these again huge you know these locations with these gigantic massive plantations some of the slaveholders have absconded they just left and left the plantations um that they maybe lived on or they had agents on completely abandoned them um some of the land was confiscated by the federal government especially if folks were were officers in the confederate army and so you literally this sounds like you're like are you talking about yes i'm talking about the united states during and after the civil war so we have to stabilize things and so the what the freedmen's bureau does is you know in my opinion it it offers the first large-scale social service program that i think we have in our our country where they're doing things like to feed the hungry they're issuing rations to people they're issuing clothing they are you know the overseers or the administrators of labor contracts between the formerly enslaved and potentially their former slaveholders or even people who are coming down from the north in the midwest to come and settle on this abandoned or confiscated land and then they start to lease it from the government you even have hospitals that pop up schools um they also dealt with um the u.s colored troops the you know black men um who enlisted in to fight in the civil war you know issuing their bounties and their pension payments we have um you know them the freeman's beer was over apprenticeships of children who were orphaned or who whose parents were deemed to be incapable of caring for them and in some states and locations a parent didn't have to give permission for their child to be apprenticed out to a certain age so you're looking at this like slavery ended it's over people are free yet there still is an underclass that also is is still kind of in the system through children being apprenticed out so in certain places like you know dc and in mississippi you see large amounts of children being apprenticed out until they get to be the age of 21 and in some places their former slaveholder is given preference over them being apprenticed out to them like it literally is codified in the law of the state so you know beyond that which still is a lot um you have marriages that are uh solemnized by bureau officials or people who are given permission to marry folks on behalf of the bureau i mean it's just it's such a huge again it's a huge uh organization with a lot of layers that that that comprise it so a lot of times when we are referring to the friedman bureau records we're really talking about a lot of different subsets of records that kind of fall under the umbrella of the friedman bureau records correct talked about the hospital records and the guardianship records and such um so ancestry had a big announcement the other day uh tell us about that and i know you have some slides that you might want to i don't know if you want to jump to those now but this big announcement is kind of kind of a big deal right right so on tuesday august 24th ancestry announced the release of 3.5 million records that are the freedmen's bureau and it is the world's largest digitized and searchable collection of freedmen's bureau records and this collection is and the way that it's made searchable is so important and i'm going to share a few slides in order to for you to see exactly how expansive this is so what you're looking at right now is a map of the states of operation that the freedmen's bureau operated in and it was across 15 states primarily in the southeast portion of the country and some of you may notice that delaware is included because delaware well there was a reason for the bureau to operate in delaware i'll just put that out there yeah but here's the thing um you know tennessee um the war department had the bureau of tennessee and and in some places like i was talking about with louisiana um in parts of mississippi even arkansas tennessee itself you know some of the records are bundled in with tennessee early and then they may shift to other states like i talked about northeast louisiana along um the delta their records are in with tennessee early on then they're in with mississippi when the bureau is created for an entire year and then the records go back to louisiana so you have to know which areas are with which you know states but for the most part we're talking about the southeast united states and the states that are shaded in gray those are the ones that have the top record counts in the collection and here's why that yeah here's why that matter now i wondered in sum total right because the bureau has a bunch of layers it's it's field offices it's state level records which are labeled assistant commissioner records it's the federal records for the national you know organization then there's there's education roles of microfilm right the the digitized collection is made up of all of these roles of microfilm when you total them all up nationally it rivals the national counts for the united states census and that's something that i really want folks to think about we would never expect for people to browse through the 1860 the 1870 and the 1880 census image by image interesting like i would you know what i mean like if i said connie i want you to go through the whole census in 1880 and still the collection yes this is really no this is just it it's phenomenal and i am grateful that you have this slide here too because it really kind of pinpoints where people might be able to do their research you know depending on what state they're in but you know correct and even that i mean even that is is is also subjective right because while florida is at the bottom of the list some of their records are wrapped in with south carolina and georgia i'm not surprised you know because of the time period i mean there's so many different factors but keep in mind again before this iteration right before making it available in this format we were literally browsing this like we were going page by page through the us census nationally not the county because some of us especially if you have people in your family like i do who i feel like were literally hiding out in a cave when the enumerators came by um and you're literally trying to find them and you you know and you're going page by page through entire districts or even an entire parish or county to find them on the census this isn't that this is the equivalent of not just the county you going through the entire nation so one of the things that i think we haven't really talked about yet is that ancestry has done an everyday every name uh index this is yes so this is this is a this is the name index this is not um there are other projects that are happening right now where literally the exact text word for word is being transcribed so that is made searchable um and you know there have been previous projects um where indexing has been done but where the pivot is in this collection is number one it brings together several databases that have been created into one space so you're not going through right and you know instead of um sometimes you want to just search the 1860 census sometimes you just want to search 1870. sometimes you want to search all of them at one time so you're going to go through u.s census you know just u.s census collection to do that that is really what the bureau collection on ancestry is doing is it's bringing all the different pieces of the octopus that make up the bureau records it's putting that in one search that hasn't been made available before i think one of the cool things about this record collection is that this gives an opportunity for people who are you know we're tracing backwards as we go to find some ancestors that they didn't know that you know maybe our elders by the time this record set comes along but are in these records along with their other family members so it helps them identify people that may be you know formerly enslaved uh individuals that you know now have a full name associated with it which i i think is is rather cool um right right uh wow this is this is really quite extensive do you have any um examples of something you've found along the way sure and some something i also um did something that also needs to be mentioned is the fact that in addition to this being a cohesive set of records that allows you to search across the the bureau you know records you know in one space it's also now hintable oh sweet that in itself right because again we are incredible we are awesome but we can't be everywhere one time like an algorithm okay and so the fact that this is hintable i'm just i'm so excited because i'm like oh my gosh like even though i've been in this collection you know pretty intimately for the last 14 plus years now that it is hintable i'm like oh my gosh what are what are all the things i left behind or i didn't even know to look for um and so that really that really excites me so know that once you start you know now that this collection is there it is now hintable just like a census or just like vital records or just like any of those things where you can start to get hints on it as well um and so yeah go ahead no i was uh i was looking for my list i know that there there are record sets like colored troops uh hospital records i mean there's i mean there's just so much to this collection it's amazing it is like a 25 layer cake or for dip um and and here's the thing it really dovetails very cohesively again with service records from the us color troops then you can get the pension cards 1890 veteran census you're looking at enlistments for the u.s color troops within the freedmen's bureau collection there's even stuff like uh when the bureau was officially the business was officially done like it was closed in 2029 which is also part of this collection this details people's early attempts to get their pensions so you know especially what we're dealing now with the pandemic and you can't go into the national archives and actually get the pensions you can have a little bit of a hold over in some instances where you can get some of the information that might be included in a pension that someone has again in the freedmen's bureau i'm trying to remember are there land records associated with this group yes there are like the southern claims commission records but i think well no actually it's a pivot there are people who received homestead act land and that was facilitated through the freedmen's bureau yeah i was trying to remember because there's so many different subsets of this uh record set i was trying to remember all all the different uh pieces um so i've got to share some things um today in terms of my own experience and for one line of my family when it comes to the freedmen's bureau and i think this really illustrates for folks how you can take you know just a little cookie crumb you know um i have a son he's young and you know kids kids leave crumbs everywhere um and so even this morning i was cleaning up crumbs from a pop-tart and you know but that little remnants right we have these little remnants we're leaving remnants behind but our ancestors did too and so um for a long time you know i was i was fairly skeptical even though i was going through the the bureau records a lot right literally going through the process of microfilm you know getting microphone crank arm you know um as much as i still love the smell and being in the library and all of that you know it's just it's a thing you know it's like you know maybe like the smell of like a basketball for like lebron james or you know you haven't lived till you've cranked the microfilm for a couple hours right right right i'm a little old-school because sometimes with the electric ones i forget if they go over or under when you and so then you know and that that ends up potentially being a hazard because it goes if it's not on there right um i digress but you know in the early days i was you know i was i was trying to find my ancestors while they were enslaved because i knew that the freedmen's bureau records documented enslaved formerly enslaved people and sometimes they it and a lot of times it actually does name who their former slave holders are or there are clues within how the people are documented within the records that will lead you to a former slaveholder and so um the first document i'm gonna show you is from um the collection when i was literally mining through it um at the national archives in san bruno i'd have to take off work every day you know take off work to go over there and and go and look through documents and the first thing i found was in letters sent this is in for field offices in louisiana again the bureau's broken down um the more local places were field offices and then above them could have been if they if the state called for it were districts um and then those were made up of counties or parishes within a state then there was an assistant commissioner who was in charge of the state then there was a person was over the whole bureau nationally so just think about all those levels and the fact that every single one of those levels generates records that's why this collection is big so this particular letter is from the uh gw rowlands or george w rowlands who was the assistant sub-assistant commissioner of the lake providence field office in lake providence louisiana and it is it's calling for a horse that belonged to my great great uncle william atlas to be returned because his horse was stolen and it describes the horse the brand that it had on it and it called for the horse to be returned at once uh once someone found it so for years i thought this is the only thing i'm going to find on my family in the freedmen's bureau like that's it i'm like a letter about a horse now interesting story uncle william actually got hit by lightning and killed while on a mule about 20 years after this found that in the newspaper thought my aunt was telling stories and then i found it covered in the paper way far away right so this is literally this was what the microfilm provided for me so years later i'm sitting at home and i am browsing through records and at this point i have been researching this line of my family for more than 20 years and i'm browsing through pre-bureau records now again this is one of those collections um the mississippi delta is very special in the fact that it has some of the earliest records are in the freedmen's bureau and this was literally at the end of a 555 or 60 page role and i was like five images until i got to the end so the popcorn is being thrown in my mouth i'm drinking i'm humming i'm singing you know whatever your research process is that was what i was doing and i saw and this was faint and i actually had to um take this into a program to bring it up because i was like am i really seeing what i think i'm seeing and so it was in a collection called permit granting so here's the thing about the freedmen's bureau despite how it's labeled don't disregard it because circulars to you might mean people are literally standing in the middle of the room turning in circles that is not what a circular is it's a flyer you're so funny so don't think again don't apply our you know the terms we use today so i'm like what's a permit granted and it said it was granted in lake providence so i'm like well let me see maybe i can find some family members on here and in this this permit granted to my great great uncle john atlas on may 17 1864 13th amendment is not until january of 1865. so this is six what seven months before that and he is getting 95 pounds of bacon a broom and some tobacco now i did not know that they smoked so once i saw this i was like wow okay this is great day-to-day granular information that we don't always get on the census maybe they were selling tobacco once they would eventually turn around and sell it for money look these these folks this is this is the this is the these are the entrepreneurial part of my family like that totally fits the bill right how much bacon can you eat correct but here's the thing what i discovered later is that and this is as a result of me using this that that notation in that green that says shorts place i wondered who was short once i did the research later i figured out that he was going to get rationed for their pla their enslaved community in the plantation that's why he had 95 pounds of bacon it was for everyone that was there because his slave holder had signed an agreement an early precursor or precursor to what we know today is labor contracts where she agreed to you know take care of the folks that were in on her land and um pay them and the the federal government through the freedmen's bureau agreed not to confine anybody on her in her you know in her auspices to service in the civil war i found that later that was all in the freedmen's bureau wow very cool so that she didn't align with the confederacy so she made that deal and so that's what they operated on but at that again how do i get to her how do i get to nancy short well i start looking for short who is short never heard this name been researching in east carol parish or carroll parish at the time for years so i go to the 1860 census because you know at this point i'm hoping that this individual that they are associated with has has you know died before the civil war because that will provide me with an estate inventory a will and other things that would name my family and notice i just talked about nancy there she is age 42. by the time the war happens her husband he was named hugh short who was an attorney at law and a planter with um fifty thousand dollars worth of real estate and thirty thousand dollars worth of personal estate he had passed away and i had to check because he wasn't on the 1870 census but she was so i'm like please have died before the war because i need that estate inventory i need that will to document my ancestors now here's the thing and i want to really call this out notice the ancestors that i'm finding in this collection are not necessarily my direct ancestor they are the brothers of my great great grandfather so just like how we have to do research when you're doing dna and your matches may not like you're to come from the same people but they may come from a sibling of your ancestor also keep that same perspective when you're going through the bureau it may not be your direct ancestor that's going to give you the lead it might be a brother in my instance almost always it's been a sibling that provided the lead so hugh i'm like please have died before 1865. and at that point i searched wills and came up with his will that was dated in 1861 just just a year after the 1860 census and so again every time i read this i still it's almost impossible for me to comprehend this will because it's just one of the it's just one of the more interesting ones that i've ever come across so he says being attacked with a hemorrhage this morning which may be from the lungs i think it best to make my will at the same time to say that there being no white person on the place i do not wish suspicion to rest on any of my negroes as some persons might think i died by the hands of violence not so my negroes would defend me to the last and the reason why he starts his will off like this is we are literally at the beginning of the civil war people in the area are burning their cotton so that the union troops will not have access to it because new orleans has been overtaken and so he is you know for him to be sick he doesn't want people to think that that he was beaten by someone in particular his enslaved people and he wants to call that out and the fact that this is memorializing his will that we're reading it at this at this time so many years later is just every time i read it i'm like oh my gosh because usually in wills with the with enslavers they they just have a certain format to them you never hear stuff like this where they are actually in some ways thinking of the the formerly enslaved in this way and right right um and i i solidly believe um because when you get to the 1870 census of my family um between my third grade grandparents and their sons they had about four thousand dollars worth of personal estate you don't get to that spot unless your slaveholder allows you to hire yourself out and they all had skilled trades um and it was fully legal for them to keep the profits of them hiring themselves out in the state of louisiana so i i honestly think that he did that but the most important part of this will after he talks about leaving his law library to his son and his wife you know collaborating with his business partner william s parham he says in the sale of my property to pay the debts i wish my negro man king and his wife rachel king and rachel are the parents of william with the horse stealing incident john who got the 95 pounds of bacon they are also my third great grandparents and the father of my father mother of my second great grandfather who is king atlas jr fantastic so yeah so just that one note that said short's place right right to go to a census find him okay he's not on 1870 let me try and find a succession in the will within this because we are in the state of louisiana and you know i'm always going to pick up louisiana and mississippi um successions are great because a lot of times the court would wait until it got to a sense of finality and all the pages are successive so you'll see they died here are the administrators we admit the will here's we give you know uh you know an administration to you know power to go and do an inventory here's the inventory here's the division of a state like it's all in successive pages so i just kept scrolling now granted when i got to that will remember it took me 20 years to get to that point it took me two hours before i scrolled the pages because i was hysterical crying because i never thought i would find those names i had settled on my folks had been brought from africa on a spaceship and dropped in lake providence louisiana i really had settled on that but i found the proof after 20 years again because we're leading the freedmen's bureau so you see two um excerpts from um the two different lists of enslaved people that hugh short was a slave holder of the first list are the folks that were at the house in town which included a man named john black who was john atlas i know that he was a house he was enslaved and he worked in the house that was oral history that was passed down to his descendants then there's a second list of enslaved which includes my third great grandparents king age 55 his wife rachel aged 55 and their two youngest children which is william from the horse stealing incident and uncle andrew then through the process of me going chasing slave tracing the slaveholders i found out that henry that is listed right underneath them is rachel's son i had no idea she had had a child prior to her marrying my third grade grandfather he's there with his wife mary who's age 22 and they have a son named william of course after his his brother william and an infant child then you skip down a couple lines and there's my second great grandfather king and at that point i said who is drusella i had never heard of drusilla i thought grandma alice was his first wife i knew about the ones afterwards i had no idea that he was even married before he had married my great-great-grandmother but there it is clear as day on the inventory of enslaved people belonging to hugh short again all of this you know once i got the bureau records that you know that you can now search and find on ancestry i was able to get to the 1860 census then the succession right and by the time i was done i was able to get a timeline of slaveholders starting by 1840 nice good for you good job seriously i mean that took so some serious amount of work but it kind of gave you some clues right from the uh the friedman bureau records and just to be clear not all of this just just to be clear not all of these records that you found came from the freedmen bureau records some of the wills and estate stuff correct that's correct and so yeah so it's pivoting right it's getting the clue and then going back to your traditional record sets in order for you to you know for you to find people um and and you know again and i i think i'm gonna really actually start using that um the terminology that i talked about earlier because i think people are more familiar with it with dna recognizing that the clue may not come through your direct ancestor it might come through a sister or a brother of theirs or even a cousin and we talk about the fan club and cluster research a lot here and um i think you know you can't you can't emphasize that enough especially for people who are just getting into genealogy that you know sometimes it's a sister's diary that has the the tidbit of juicy information that you need so correct correct yeah and and and again there here's the thing there are so many documents i mean it's just we could we could literally we could play we could play all day i do personally just because i'm curious right this is a list of um it's a report of indigent refugees in friedman and it's from a voyage parish louisiana and it's dated um the january 1st to the 31st 1867 and what i want to call out are the people who are in green okay those individuals are age 90 in 1867. holy cow this is not a rarity this is this is across the board remember our country was an upheaval at this point so there are scores of folks most of the most of the rations list that i see the majority of the people are over age 50 which means that those individuals may not have even lived to the 1870 census this might be the only time you actually see them documented in fact if you've ever heard of the georgetown 272 i found them getting rations in eberville paris louisiana in their 80s and their 90s within the freedmen's bureau collection so this record is from january 1867 is that what that says that's correct so that means that these 90 year olds were born prior to the 1800s correct they were born about 1777. holy cow that's that's pretty good stuff right there and and again what other set of documents do we have to cover that really crucial five-year time span with the end of the war with the end of slavery and the 1870 census beyond right local records but even then you're at the mercy of did the courthouse burn down at some point exactly so so and because this is federal thankfully you know we have not we're going to cross our fingers and pray that we never have a catastrophic fire at our archives but but that's that's this is yet instilled a great example of this now something else that again with the title bureau of refugees the refugees were poor whites so this collection is not just entirely about the formerly enslaved or free people of color or black people remember there were white folks who came and got services from the bureau there are white folks that worked for the bureau teachers agents in the field offices um people who just worked as clerks in the offices there are also black folks that had support roles to for the orchestra you know for the uh the you know administration of the the the bureau so it's intentional enough too hello right and some of those folks win in the new roles and and the other thing is if you have an ancestor who is living in the north and you find someone with a similar name in the freedmen's bureau do not assume your ancestor didn't come down from the north to come and work that land they could have and they might be on a labor contract so this document we're looking at is very similar to the last one i just showed you but this is in orleans parish in louisiana and it's it's destitute notice they scratched out freed and freed so it's destitute whites indigenous destitute white people in the parish of orleans um applying for relief march 10 1868 to april 10 1868 and again all these people on this list are white they're not black a lot of the lists are segregated just like a lot of the records during this time span you're going to see records for whites and records for blacks but it literally will be in the exact same collection and i want to call attention to um a 29 year old woman who's there in green who has three children under the age of and her cause of destitution is the fact that her husband died and she has three sick children now how do you take this record and go somewhere else that's amazing i'm wondering too as i look at you know i'm always professing to go look at the people above and the people below or pages to the left pages to the right and try and extract some of that data to see if there aren't any other family members by the same names or or whatever do you feel like these records would have the same opportunity to do that kind of neighborly research uh 110 yeah good all right yeah 110 that is in fact again that kind of goes back to you know the point of searching for siblings um that yeah searching for siblings family members community members all of that i mean and and here's the thing i went to the 1870 census two years later and i find her by herself working as a domestic servant in the household of a man named samuel ehrlich who is a um retired dry good dry goods dealer was born in russia and she herself johanna madden was born in ireland i see that i would that caught my eye and i think her parents are born foreign-born as well correct correct yes wow good stuff last one the child with my favorite name uh right now uh this is a list of pupils transferred from the lincoln to the frederick douglass school on the 18th of april 1866 with the amount of tuition they paid freedman's bureau again they operated schools one of the most well-known freeman's bureau schools that is still in operation is howard university in washington d.c there's also a hospital attached to howard that was a freedmen's bureau hospital and on this list is number 22 a little girl named valentine grand prix who has paid her dollar 50 um to go to this school and there this list has a hundred plus children on it um and i've been on hot on the trail trying to find all of them just because i want to know where they went what happened to them and so um i decided to take this list from 1866 take it to the 1870 census and you find 15 year old because we didn't have you know ages on that last list uh we find 15 year old valentine in the house with her grandma who appears to be her grandmother who was born in cuba listed as valentin guber i think it's goober and her mother louise grand prix she's got a sister named louise brother named henry um sister named irma or elmer and other folks within the household wow good stuff you are awesome [Laughter] well clearly you've been working with this for a while and and have a good grasp of these records anything else that uh that we missed now that i'm thinking about it contraband camps and refugee camps along with home colonies so contraband camps are where um the you know enslaved or formerly enslaved depending on where they lived remember the emancipation proclamation only applied to specific states um and then even then were the local people actually abiding by the fact that slaves were free usually that's not the case but either way the formerly enslaved especially if their slaveholders you know absconded left um or they saw the union troops there they would leave and begin these sort of camps because they would they would want to you know gain services and help from the union troops and so they would set up in these locations um you know it would become almost sort of like a little town and so the contraband in the name contraband camp were the formerly enslaved because they were considered contraband from the enemy government right then you also have refugee camps again that term refers to poor whites or indigent whites who were in these locations where the bureau operated so they also had camps then when you start talking about home colonies that's a whole separate concept it's sort of the same um one well-known one is destrehan plantation in south louisiana it's it's a plantation you can actually go and visit now um and that was the site of the louisiana slave revolt in 1811. the owner of the plantation at the time of the civil war became a uh he became a part of the confederate army and he actually was a uh officer in it and so the government came in and confiscated his land and that that land that was the home colony was destroying plantation it was a sugar plantation what they they use it as was sort of like a um it was a dispensation point people could come in they have lists of people who come in and list the people who leave it was a hospital they issued rations clothing people actually worked the plantation and in exchange for their labor they were able to live there and be taken care of and so when you have the home colonies you have even more records because some of the lists are almost like censuses people again they came in and they left and these exist all across the country and these records are part of that friedman bureau collection beautiful awesome wow not only are we getting a genealogy lesson from you we're getting a history lesson as well so thank you for that um well gosh this has been like wildly educational um you know for everybody so let me let me ask you this if people aren't familiar with you where can they learn more about you well um you can check me out here on youtube i have a youtube channel called who is nika smith um i also have a website who is nikkismith.com and um i do lectures and and teach all across um the genealogy world so you may see me at a conference or event or maybe at your local society and i also have a patreon community where i do a lot of this teaching in fact this year we've done five different webinars on the freedmen's bureau one that's an overview and then we have others offered on various states like west virginia virginia south carolina louisiana and mississippi that are specific to those states and we'll be expanding those um as well well thank you so much for for this gosh you know i i need to go back and dig into these records again because it's been a little while since i looked at them just browse that's the best way to learn this collection like i i mean i can't that that's how i've learned and the guide you you live and die by that guide for that state um you know i just always say i'm like we didn't put our tax dollars to use for the national archives staff to write those wonderful guides and we're just like i don't need it like we should you know what i mean that guide is there for a reason it provides an incredible history of what happened specifically in that state and things to look for you know i call them you know like golden eggs right like what are the golden ticket items in that respective state you know um where you know like where do they give a huge number of rations out so then that's like in addition to the normal things like you know labor contracts and lists you know when you're looking for lists you're specifically looking for rations because you know that state issued a ton of rations you know really sort of directing your research in that way um with reading the guides helped and trust me i understand because it's i mean it's 20 pages some guides are a hundred so totality i know that on ancestry that you can get directly to the freedmen bureau records by going to ancestry.com forward slash uh friedman i think friedman s yeah freedman's with the next uh yeah so if you know i'll put that on the screen as well but um yeah well thank you so much this has been awesome no problem yeah and there's i mean i yeah as i'm finding things like and this is just a practice i just have i'm just saving them to a folder you know saving it to my shoe box because i'm like you know i have a greatest hits folder you know just of stuff that i'm finding because you just you don't know what's in here like we just we don't know right like that sounds crazy because you can say there were this many people on the census and this many people between this age and that we really do not know everything that's in here we don't yeah and with uh with this edition of ancestry hopefully more people will learn about the friedman bureau records i know a lot of people don't even know what they are um boy this is this has been great thank you so much for joining me today and hopefully uh people will get get a sense of of where they can go next to find their african-american research and their white ancestors as well correct correct thanks for having me now remember everyone has access to these records on ancestry just make sure that you have that guest account at least so that you can research these records now they are available on family search as well but it is my understanding that the index of these records is in every name index on ancestry now i'm always saying this if you can't find what you're looking for on whatever your favorite platform is make sure you're checking out the other platforms and do uh searches there as well because the search engines and the indexing sometimes are different and so it may deliver different results all right now as a reminder there is a handout for this episode if you want the handout for this uh make sure that you are joined at the information access level channel membership those channel members will find the the handouts in the community tab and your supporting genealogy tv along the way if you are a patron at the patreon.com forward slash genealogy tv at the happy dance level which is like 15 a month i think or higher the handouts will be emailed to you each month as they come about and you'll find those in the post as well you can also find the handouts at genealogytv.org for just individual purchase don't forget to like subscribe and share you can help me get to 100 000 subscribers i'm dying to get there and well there are more videos on the screen that may help you with your genealogical journey i hope you're getting a lot of value out of that if so uh hit the like button for me all right well until next time keep on climbing your family tree

Channel: Genealogy TV

Views: 4,173

Rating: 4.959322 out of 5

Keywords: Freedmen's Bureau Records Now on Ancestry.com, black history, african american genealogy, black genealogy, about the Freedmen’s Bureau Records, Freedman Bank Records, black ancestors, where to find the freedmen’s bureau records, ancestry, family tree, genealogy, genealogist, family history, ancestry free, genealogy research, how to find family history, Genealogy tv, #genealogy, #familyhistory, #genealogytv, youtube, DNA, DNA research, Black family history

Id: S8-4fWFNwP0

Length: 47min 43sec (2863 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021