The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), also known as the Mormon Church, is releasing online more than 1.5 million records pertaining to about 4 million former slaves, and it needs volunteers to help index the huge trove of genealogical information.
In partnership with the National Archives, which stores these records, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Mormon Church is launching the Freedmen Bureau Project at DiscoverFreedmen.org, a new website that makes these documents available free to anyone who searches for them.
The goal is to help present-day African Americans go back to their roots, without the seeming brick wall that hits them when they go as far back as 1870 — when slaves were shown on paper simply as tics or hash marks. The LDS Church believes scanning and uploading these handwritten documents online will give the descendants of former slaves a chance to connect with their ancestors from the Civil War era.
"One of our key beliefs is that our families can be linked forever and that knowing the sacrifices, joys and the paths our ancestors trod helps us to know who we are and what we can accomplish," said Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Church's Quorom of the Twelve Apostles. "I witnessed the healing and joy African Americans experienced as they discovered their ancestors for the first time in those records."
The documents include labor contracts, marriage registers, apprenticeship papers and others compiled in 15 states and the District of Columbia from the reports of around 900 agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, an agency formed to help former slaves create new lives for themselves. These records are however in "raw" form and have yet to be organized and indexed to make them easy to search. For this task, the Church is asking volunteers to comb through the massive trove and include the names they find in a database.
Genealogist Hollis Gentry of the Smithsonian Institute says the group hopes to have all records indexed by the fall of 2016, in conjunction with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The announcement of the Freedmen Bureau's Project comes on the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth, when news of the abolition of slavery finally reached the slaves of Texas — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was declared. The project was named after the Freemen Bureau, which provided support to former slaves transitioning into a life of freedom by opening schools and hospitals.
