The Freedmen's Bureau Records Preservation Act of 2000 passed in the House Of Representatives on October 19, 2000. The bill was introduced initially on September 12, 2000. The Senate passed the bill on October 26th. The bill was sent to President Clinton for his signature, which is required for passage, on October 28, 2000. President Clinton signed the act on November 6, 2000 and it became public law No: 106-444 on that date.
The bill addresses the need to preserve original records that contain data about the African-American experience during slavery and freedom, including marriage records, labor contracts, Government rations, and back pay records, and indentured contracts for minors. These records are maintained in Alabama, Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Delaware, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
The Freedmen's Bureau records are an important link for African-Americans to their slave and african ancestors. Preserving these records is a high priority and the bill provides for the utilization of available technology to restore the documents and to utilize innovative imaging and indexing technologies to make these records easily accessible to the public, including historians, genealogists, novice genealogy enthusiasts, and students.
The Freedmen's Bureau was created by Congress after the civil war to help newly freed blacks make the transition from slavery to freedom. It supervised abandoned or confiscated land, issued rations of clothing and medicine, established hospitals, monitored working conditions, recorded marriages and set up schools. The Bureau operated from 1865 to 1872. You can view the act that created the Freedmen's Bureau by clicking on the link.
The Freedmen's Bureau records should prove to be of interest to all researchers as they contain information on slaves, their owners, civil war veterans, government employees, war refugees, plantation owners, teachers, doctors and almost anyone else who may have had dealings with former slaves.
The bill, HR 5157, can be viewed in its entirity by clicking on the link. Additional information on HR 5157 can be found at:
http://thomas.loc.gov
The Freedmen's Bureau site can be found at www.freedmensbureau.com/ The site has information on marriage records for blacks in the mid 1860's, links to other African-American history and genealogy related sites, records relating to murders and outrages, as well as other interesting information.
The records relating to Murders and Outrages covers reports made in most of the southern states including serious crimes committed by whites against freedmen, crimes of whites against whites, freedmen against freedmen and freedmen against whites. Unfortunately, records from Mississippi are not yet online, but the reports that are online make for interesting and compelling reading even if you don't find an ancestor among them. Perhaps, in this instance, not finding an ancestor may be a good thing since most of those mentioned were either murderers or those who had met their demise.
You can also link to the Freedmen's Bureau from the main page listing of off-site links. Please bear in mind that linking from this page to the Freedmen's Bureau site will take you away from the Attala County ALHN site with no return link. You would have to utilize your browsers 'Back' button to return to this site. But, by all means check out the Freedmen's Bureau site when time permits.
