Web database to help blacks trace ancestry

By steven g. vegh
The Virginian-Pilot

CHESAPEAKE - After the Civil War, the federal Freedmen's Bureau helped former slaves document marriages, reunite with families and navigate their new, unfamiliar freedom.

In the process, the bureau also recorded the names of men, women and children previously regarded as property rather than people.

Those records are on the way to becoming a Web-accessible genealogical treasure trove, thanks to the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia that is co-sponsoring a family history fair in Chesapeake on Saturday.

The museum is recruiting volunteers to help computerize the bureau's old Virginia archives, said Roice Luke, a Virginia Commonwealth University scholar who will describe the project Saturday.

The goal is a searchable database likely to be invaluable to genealogists and especially black families trying to identify their ancestors, he said.

Before emancipation, slaves were not counted as name-bearing people by the national census, Luke said. S tarting in 1865, though, the Freedmen's Bureau documented the identities and family ties of many of the 4 million freed slaves.

The bureau was phased out in 1872, but its archives are considered "genesis records" - that is, the earliest compilation of data on blacks, according to the museum.

The original paper documents were converted to microfilm by National Archives and Records Administration. The pictures were then scanned into digital images by the Genealogical Society of Utah, which is collaborating with the museum.

Now, the museum is equipping volunteers with software that allows pertinent genealogical information, including names, to be extracted from the images and collected in a database.

When completed, the database will be stored at Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, D.C., launched by General Oliver O. Howard, who supervised the Freedmen's Bureau.