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History Now Accessible: Virginia's Freedmen records of thousands of former slaves are digitized and put online
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Viola Baskerville, Virginia’s secretary of administration, discovered the name of her maternal great-great-great-grandfather through the records.
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Published: July 13, 2009
For more than 100 years, the history and heritage of millions of former slaves sat in a dusty warehouse of federal archives.
Their names and the dates that marked their lives were recorded on handwritten sheets of paper by the Freedmen's Bureau of the U.S. War Department, established by Congress in 1865 to assist refugees and freed slaves after the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation.
Last Thursday, modern technology breathed new life into the history of Virginia's freedmen.
Officials announced that an ambitious three-year project to digitize more than 300,000 state records from the Freedmen's Bureau archives has been completed and now is available online.
Virginia is the first of the 14 former slave-owning states to have its records digitized. The records include names, marriages, educational pursuits, work contracts and other information.
"This project is exciting for Virginia and exciting for the world," said Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, announcing the milestone outside of the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia in Richmond.
"What we have done is helped preserve the legacy of those nearly 4 million freedmen who at the end of the Civil War stepped out of slavery and into freedom."
In that legacy are the untold stories of a nation built on the backs of blacks who first arrived on Virginia's shores in 1619 as slaves to the European settlers of Jamestown.
By 1776, Kaine said, half of the slave population in the colonies resided in Virginia.
Reginald Washington of the National Archives shared a few of their stories. There was Hawkins Wilson, sold at a sheriff's sale to a landowner in Texas, who made his way back to Caroline County looking for his family.
And Benjamin and Sarah Manson, who, records indicate, were married in 1843 on their slave owner's porch. And a mother known only as Hannah, who was sold from her owner and separated from her baby, only to return five years later to a child who didn't recognize her.
"There are many, many other stories in those records that need to get out," Washington said.
One of them belongs to Virginia Secretary of Administration Viola Baskerville, who helped coordinate the Virginia portion of the project. Doing her own research, she was able to trace her ancestors to the early 1800s by finding an old Freedmen's record preserved by the Hanover County clerk's office.
Baskerville finally learned the name of her maternal great-great-great-grandfather, a slave: Robbin Braxton. "I cried," she said.
Baskerville said that her research uncovered "huge circumstantial evidence" that Carter Braxton, a Virginian who signed the Declaration of Independence, owned Robbin Braxton.
In 2000, the National Archives and U.S. Census Bureau began converting the records to microfiche. The digitization project was completed during the past three years with the help of hundreds of volunteers, the state of Virginia, the Black History Museum, and the organization Family Search, formerly known as the Genealogical Society of Utah and affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Thursday's announcement came on the 141st anniversary of the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It effectively enforced the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery by establishing that any person born or naturalized in the United States was a citizen of the country, entitled to the same rights to life, liberty and property and equal protection under the law.
■ Jim Nolan is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
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