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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

What happened to the Virginia Freedmen's Project records?

A number of news announcement reported the completion of the Virginia Freedmen's Project. The records included in the database include marriages, birth certificates, contracts and even some personal narratives. The Virginia records include vital statistics for 931,268 individuals. See the Richmond Times-Dispatch. To quote the news article,
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 former 14 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.
The Governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine's site notes that the project was created "Under the direction of the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia and in collaboration with FamilySearch, volunteers digitized the records of names, marriages, educational pursuits, work contracts, health care and legal services and other important information from the Virginia Freedmen's Bureau. The records can now be viewed temporarily at the FamilySearch web site, and negotiations are currently ongoing to permanently host the records through the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture."

There is just one problem. The records are not on FamilySearch. They are also not on any of the Virginia sites. The links in the articles do not lead to the records. Where are they? It looks like the announcement is premature. If any of my readers has found the records, please let me know where they are?

3 comments:

  1. Have you been to this site?
    http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/freedmen1.html

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  2. Replies
    1. See http://freedmensbureau.com/
      I think this is where the records ended up.

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