Key African American history source now online, governor’s office says

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced today that the historic Virginia Freedmen’s Bureau records are now available online to historians, family history researchers and others.

The records are considered the earliest major compilation of information on the African-American community, the governor’s office said.

Kaine said volunteers digitized the records of names, marriages, educational details, work contracts, health care and other data under the direction of the Black History Museum and the Cultural Center of Virginia.

The records can be viewed at the FamilySearch Web site, http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html, Kaine said. There are plans for the records to be hosted permanently through the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“This project is exciting for Virginia and for the world,”  Kaine said. “What we have done is helped preserve the legacy of those nearly four million freedmen who at the end of the Civil War stepped out of slavery and into freedom.”

Kaine announced in 2006 that Virginia would be the first state to index the Freedmen’s records.