Virginia to digitize African-American records

“Whisperers from the Dust,” a presentation on freed African-Americans’ records becoming digitalized and available to the general public, came to VCU Thursday.

VCU Professor Roice Luke and University of Richmond Associate Professor Darrell Walden are co-founders of the “Virginia Freedmen Project.” Luke and Walden presented the project and called for volunteers to take part in the digitalization of the records.

For more information about the “Virginia Freedmen Project,”
go to http://www.blackhistorymuseum.org/bureau/
or http://www.richmond.edu/~dwalden/vafreedmen/

“To be able to be one of the first folks to see those documents and to transcribe them, to be able to tell your grandchildren that you were there when the Freedmen Bureau records were extracted and indexed, I think, is a wonderful story to be able to tell in the future,” Walden said.

The project was created to help African-American families learn more about their family history through historical records.

The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, a federal agency established in 1865, assisted freed slaves in becoming citizens after the Civil War.

The National Archives and Records Administration microfilmed the records kept in the bureau’s archives. Virginia was the last state to have its records microfilmed, but is now the first state to have them digitalized.

The national Freedman’s Savings & Trust Company, created at the same time as the bureau, kept another set of records including the names of 480,000 people, according to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia’s Web site.

The records to be digitalized include labor contracts, marriage, school and hospital documents and family correspondence.

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of these documents,” Luke said. “As the slaves came out of slavery, these were the first major compilation of records of these four million people ever collected.”

The digitalization project is calling for people to assist in transcribing the names and information of the people from the records.

VCU Associate Professor Ann Creighton Zollar said the project will make family history research easier for African-Americans.

“(The project) is to encourage and strengthen families, particularly those within the African-American community and to discover their geneology and their family history,” Zollar said. “The freedmen project team has linked the history and records of the Freedmen Bureau and Freedman’s Bank to African-American genealogical research.”

Luke said the project is still in its beginning stage of development.

“We are just starting this project. We are just learning what is on those records,” Luke said. “This is going to be fun. It’s like looking inside and unpeeling an onion, and seeing what’s in there.”