Freedmen's Bureau Project

The Freedmen's Bureau Project is a cultural heritage partnership with an ambitious goal and, although that goal is not yet officially met, I feel this collaboration has already succeeded enough to be included among those "completed in the last 5 years." The Freedmen's Bureau Project is a partnership among the National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Afro­American Historical and Genealogical Society, the California African American Museum, and the non-profit organization FamilySearch.  It kicked off June 19, 2015, with an anticipated conclusion of June 19, 2016.  In one year's time, their goal is to have indexed, arbitrated, and made available online over 1.5 million handwritten records from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau.  The records are held and preserved by NARA and "constitute the richest and most extensive documentary source available for investigating the African American experience in the post-Civil War and Reconstruction eras."[1]  The selection of the dates was intentional, as June 19, 2015, was the 150th anniversary of "Juneteenth," or Emancipation Day, the much celebrated date on which Texas announced the abolition of slavery.

The Freedmen's Bureau Records - A Bit of Background

The Freedmen's Bureau Records are widely considered a keystone in African American genealogical records.  After the Civil War, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen's Bureau) offered assistance to many thousands of former slaves and poor whites in the Southern States and District of Columbia. With nearly four million slaves suddenly liberated, many cities, towns, and areas of plantation-based economy were left in tatters. Former slaves and many whites were dislocated from their homes, faced starvation, and owned nothing more than the clothes on their backs. "The challenge of establishing a new social order, founded on freedom and racial equality, was enormous. The Bureau was established in the War Department in 1865 to undertake the relief effort and the unprecedented social reconstruction that would bring freedpeople to full citizenship. It issued food and clothing, operated hospitals and temporary camps, helped locate family members, promoted education, helped freedmen legalize marriages, provided employment, supervised labor contracts, provided legal representation, investigated racial confrontations, settled freedmen on abandoned or confiscated lands, and worked with African American soldiers and sailors and their heirs to secure back pay, bounty payments, and pensions."[1]  In short, nothing surpasses this collection of records for those searching for African American genealogical material.

Key Players

The National Archives and Records Administration, a federal agency and in their own words "our nation's record keeper", is home to the over 1.5 million original Freedmen’s Bureau records.  It began microfilming the collection in the 1970s and completed the work, after a two-stage, multi-step process, in 2006.[2]  It has provided those microfilm copies for use with the indexing project.

The non-profit organization, FamilySearch, which collects genealogical materials around the world from individuals, government agencies, and institutions, had already worked with NARA on the Freedmen's Bureau records by digitizing the nearly 2000 reels of microfilm. They host the genealogical websites www.familysearch.org (where the non-indexed images are currently browsable) and www.discoverfreedmen.org where where the indexing project is managed.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Afro­American Historical and Genealogical Society, and the California African American Museum are both stakeholders and supporters of the project.  Each organization will offer access to the completed indexes for their own constituents when the project is completed.  While the project is underway, each has proven their commitment of making the records available to wider audiences via their own websites and media resources and, most importantly, they have helped provide the workforce by recruiting and training volunteer indexers, providing access to the files on their websites, and promoting indexing events in their regions.  For example, SNMAAHC  made an initial pledge to recruit 2,016 volunteers for the project.[3]

The project

Optical Character Recognition (OCR), while handy for reading text in PDFs, still struggles with handwritten records.  While wonderful for providing access to previously hidden materials, the digitizing of microfilm, as FamilySearch had already done with the over 1800 reels of Freedmen's Bureau records, only provides a browsing opportunity for researchers.  To quickly and pointedly search for information within even digitized handwritten materials, the records must be indexed. Entering information from historical records into an online, searchable database provides that index -- and requires diligent reading, sense-making, and transcribing of every variety of handwriting.

Grassroots volunteers had already completed the name indexes for the Virginia records in 2009.  Since that time, they have been available for searching and browsing at the FamilySearch website, familysearch.org, as the collection “Virginia, Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office Records, 1865-1872.” FamilySearch had also already indexed the Bank Records collection in 2001. However, those records only represent about 10% of the entire NARA collection and took over 10 years to index.

Success?

According to FamilySearch International, by December 2015 they had reached over 15 percent of the records were searchable online and over 440,000 records were indexed, thanks to the efforts of 10,000 volunteers.[4]  Now, only two months later, nearly 16,000 volunteers have indexed over 1 million records and over 51 percent of the entire collection has been arbitrated.[5]  They currently state that they expect to everything to be completed in time to coincide with the opening of the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture facility in September 2016.   Although that date is three months later than the stated Juneteenth goal, I assume that it implies that all indexing will be completed by June and that arbitration, review, and general cleaning up of that indexing will then follow, allowing the debut in September.  In my mind, the milestones they have already announced constitute success.

By combining their respective resources across the country, these agencies have recruited nearly 16,000 volunteers in eight months -- a feat in itself, but all the more remarkable in its level of active engagement.  When the program began last June FamilySearch acknowledged the grandeur of the project's goal, noting that it took 11 years to index the first 10 percent of the full collection and that they aimed to complete the final 90 percent in just one year.[6]  If their claims are true, these agencies have already earned remarkable success in this venture -- although, in comparison to the indexing of the 1940 Census (another NARA, FamilySearch, and multiple organization collaboration) it may fall somewhat short, as that project involved only a little over twice as many images but lured ten times as many volunteers and was completed in only 4 months.[7]  Still, I smell success.

That said, however, what are some of the issues that could otherwise complicate matters?  The publicity on this project keeps most of the cards hidden.  FamilySearch has been the only player issuing press releases since the initial launch.  It is my estimation that volunteer recruitment has gone relatively well, but the fact that the project is still calling for volunteers indicates that it could have been farther along by now and that there is a rush to meet deadline.  That said, red flags raise my concern regarding quality of workmanship.  Relying on volunteers can be tricky -- and relying on volunteers recruited by multiple agencies (online!) may be trickier still.  Over the years of my own genealogical research using indexed, digitized images of handwritten records I have encountered countless mistakes in transcription.  I fear that projects of expedited indexing speed and reliance upon untold numbers of volunteers may sacrifice quality over quantity and, certainly, time will tell for this project.  I only hope that time will also prove this to be a project that has learned from previous mistakes.  Having read that initial efforts to index the Lincoln Papers with crowdsourced volunteers resulted in a project that took more time to re-do (due to horrific workmanship) than it ever would have taken to do by professionals in the first place has scared me straight (for now).[8]  This project seems to have, hopefully, avoided such an issue by the concerted effort to both recruit and train volunteers through proscribed methods.  I, myself, in my research was already tempted to join the recruitment effort, but (for lack of time, as yet) have not completed the training modules required.  I believe this bodes well for the project as a whole.

---

[1] The Freedmen's Bureau, 1865-1872. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. URL: http://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau/

[2] Microfilming the Freedmen's Bureau Records. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. URL: http://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau/microfilm-project.html

[3] Freedmen’s Bureau Project.  Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.  URL: http://nmaahc.si.edu/GetInvolved/FreedmensBureau

[4] Nauta, Paul G. "Milestones Reached in Freedmen’s Bureau Project." FamilySearch Blog (December 1, 2015). URL: https://familysearch.org/blog/en/milestones-reached-freedmens-bureau-project/

[5] Nauta, Paul G. " Much Anticipated Historic Freedmen’s Bureau Project Reaches Halfway Point with More Than One Million Records Transcribed and More Online Volunteers Needed to Hit Juneteenth Goal." FamilySearch Blog (February 18, 2016).  URL: https://familysearch.org/blog/en/anticipated-historic-freedmens-bureau-project-reaches-halfway-point-million-records-transcribed-online-volunteers-needed-hit-juneteenth-goal/

[6] The Freedmen's Bureau Project At-A-Glance. URL: https://edge.fscdn.org/assets/img/downloads/pdfs/freedmens_infographic-1403c48fd9fc92257c09581fa20fbecd.pdf

[7] "Genealogy Volunteers Index 1940 U.S. Census in Record Time." Morman Newsroom (September 7, 2012). URL: http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/genealogy-volunteers-index-mammouth-1940-census-in-record-time

[8] Cohen, Patricia. "Scholars Recruit Public for Project." New York Times (December 27, 2010). URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/books/28transcribe.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2