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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums19th century digitized records give Black families a glimpse of their ancestry
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/digital-records-19th-century-give-black-families-glimpse-ancestry-rcna2060I could not turn from the page for an hour, she said. I had resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to find them. So, I called my cousin who had been searching also for 20 years and I said, Guess what? We didnt come here on a spaceship from Cameroon and land in North Louisiana.
A renowned genealogist, Sewell-Smith gathered much of the information through the Freedmens Bureau, a federal agency for formerly enslaved Black people created near the end of the Civil War in 1865. Its goal was to assist the newly freed in their transition out of slavery by negotiating labor contracts, legalizing marriages and locating lost relatives, among other things, documenting it all. It also provided food, housing, education and medical care to more than 4 million people, including poor whites and veterans displaced by war.
For decades, the information was hard to come by. It required patience and determination, attributes that allowed Sewell-Smith to hole up in the National Archives, libraries and research centers and her desk at home to go through archaic microfilm by the thousands, document by document.
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.
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19th century digitized records give Black families a glimpse of their ancestry (Original Post)
pnwmom
Sep 2021
OP
tblue37
(64,980 posts)1. K&R for visibility. nt
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)3. Thanks! n/t
Elessar Zappa
(13,650 posts)4. Great news.
K&R.
Bettie
(15,998 posts)5. That is cool
and about time...
PurgedVoter
(2,191 posts)6. Seriously, God bless Ancestry.com
This is the nicest thing I have heard all week.