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After researching her family’s origins in America for more than 20 years, Nicka Sewell-Smith found the name of an uncle who had made a complaint for stealing his horse. Another note says that about seven months before the passing of the 13th
With their standard supply of popcorn and a drink within reach, Sewell-Smith clicked on to learn that Hugh Short was an attorney and owner of enslaved blacks. Then she came across Short’s will, which listed the names of her great, great, great-grandparents at the bottom of the document.
“I couldn’t turn the page for an hour,” she said. “I had come to terms with the fact that I would never find her. So I called my cousin, who had also been looking for 20 years, and said, ‘Guess what? We didn’t come here in a spaceship from Cameroon and landed in northern Louisiana. ‘”
Sewell-Smith, a renowned genealologist, gathered a lot of information through the Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency for formerly enslaved blacks established towards the end of the Civil War in 1865. Her goal was to help the newly liberated in their transition out of slavery by negotiating employment contracts, legalizing marriages and finding lost relatives, among other things, to document everything. It provided food, shelter, education, and medical care to more than 4 million people, including poor whites and war veterans.
For decades it was difficult to get information. It took patience and determination, attributes that enabled Sewell-Smith to hide in the national archives, libraries, and research centers – and her desk at home – searching through thousands, document by document, archaic microfilms.
However, this month genealogy site Ancestry.com revealed a black family game changer – 3.5 million records by previously enslaved blacks, available for free.
It is believed to be the world’s largest digitized and searchable collection of archives from Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedman’s Bank. The collection has won over black genealogists and habitual researchers because it is much easier for the descendants of the enslaved in America to learn more about their families.
“This is very exciting and will help many researchers, historians and common people to learn more about their ancestors,” said Angela Dodson, CEO of Editorsoncall, a company that provides editorial services to writers. Dodson has done a great deal of research into her own family tree.
“It is often very difficult for black Americans to keep track of their history because of the disruption of slavery, downstream selling, etc.,” she said. “I am often haunted by something I read in one of the tales of the formerly enslaved, who remembered that black people simply wandered the streets and paths after the civil war in search of long-lost relatives. This post-war period is a crucial time in trying to make some of these connections. “
Additionally, the collection is significant as it is most likely the first time newly liberated African Americans appear in records after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, as many enslaved people were previously excluded from the standard census and federal documents.
“The monstrous thing is that this is something we knew was there, but we thought it was out of our fingertips,” said Sewell-Smith. “To see how ancestors commemorate … there are documents in this collection in which 100-year-old people in 1865 were given rations. We count that out automatically. ‘Oh, that’s not possible, not on paper.’ But it’s right there. “
Dennis Richmond Jr., 26, of Yonkers, New York, thought it was incredible that when he was 13, the iconic miniseries “Roots” moved him the way it did. He watched it with his father, who “every Sunday†shared his family’s ancestry with his young son. As Richmond got older, the Freedmen’s Bureau became its daily attraction.
“I come from two unique black families,†he said. “My father’s family were quasi-free blacks, so they weren’t slaves. They were black people who read and wrote or bought and sold land or sent their children to school.
“On my mother’s side, from South Carolina, I found large plantations and fields and sales contracts and families buying Africans from slave ships from Ghana, Mali and Senegal. I found out about the freedmen’s office through my mother’s ancestors because they were the ancestors who were enslaved during the civil war. “
These discoveries made Richmond proud, which he believes is the value of blacks learning their family history.
“We live in a time when so many people try to ignore certain stories,” he said. “But you can’t ignore history – if you can prove it. Especially when you’re connected to it. There’s the Freedmen’s Bureau, papers that you can now access online that connect you to your story. I found out that after slavery my ancestor, along with other slaves, had saved money to get medical help. That almost made me cry. I would never learn that in public school. We knew that we had a carpal tunnel from all that cotton picking and we looked for help. “
Linda Buggs-Simms of St. Louis is writing a book about her family after collecting information from the Mississippi State Archives and the Freedmen’s Bureau. She found a number of great-great-grandparents mentioned on an employment contract in Mississippi. She also confirmed the slave owner who was the landowner in the contract and discovered a photo of one of her newly found family members.
“There is not a day that I don’t look up my family and other records on the computer,†she said. “It is addictive. When I see my ancestors recorded in an employment contract … I tear up at the sight of their names. And now, with this breakthrough at the Freedmen’s Bureau, you can get records beyond 1870. It’s like tearing down the Jericho wall. ”
Denessia Swanegan said that she feels the same way about having access to so much data. “As a little kid in the 1960s, I was always fascinated by the stories my parents and siblings told about the family,†she says.
As an adult, she said, she began following her family history in 1980 by “watching roll after roll of microfilm census records.” She found her great-great-grandfather’s name in the 1870 census and later learned – through a Facebook group called Our Black Ancestry – that it was on January 1, 1866 in Leavenworth, Kansas, from Rev. Hiram R. married Revels, who later became the first black man in the US Senate.
She also learned that her relative was one of the first to volunteer for the Civil War as part of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry. Swanegan also found his death certificate and burial site.
“He had no grave markings,†she said, “so I was able to have a Civil War-era tombstone engraved on his resting place with his name, rank, and military unit by the Veterans Administration. This is one of the most satisfying achievements of my years of research. “
It’s stories like this that make access to the freedman’s office so important, she said.
“We need to be aware of the things our ancestors went through and how they persevered in order for us to be here,” she said. “We’re doing them a great disservice if we don’t find out about them and their lives. We need to breathe life into their stories and share them with future generations. Our future can only be improved if we go back to our deep past. “
Buggs-Simms added, “The greatest gift you can give your descendants is their inheritance, so that they really know where they are from. With my two granddaughters, I can bring them back seven generations on one line and eight on another and have pictures to support them. And that’s intoxicating. “
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