Ancestry.com, one of the biggest genealogy websites, is celebrating Black History Month by launching five new collections of records. These records document early African- American history. In order to search through these records, you need to be a member of Ancestry.com
This isn’t the first time that Ancestry.com has released a collection of records and documents that just so happen to connect with something on the calendar. Last year, they gave everyone, members and non-members alike, free access to it’s military records collection for an entire weekend. It was their way of celebrating Veterans Day. After that weekend was over, access was once again restricted only to people who had become members of the website. Clearly, it was very kind of Ancestry.com to offer what is usually a service one must pay for as a free service for a weekend. On the other hand, I’m sure it worked well as a way to encourage new customers to try out their website.
This time, in honor of the Twenty-Fifth anniversary of Black History Month, Ancestry.com has released over 250,000 historical records that are new to the Ancestry.com website. These records all document early African American history.
These records are grouped into five collections. One is called “US Colored Troops Service Records”. This collection spans from 1861 to 1867. You can find enlistment papers, casualty sheets, death reports, and correspondence. Another collection is called “Slave Ship Manifests from Savannah”, and it covers the years 1789 through 1859. This is where to look for port records of the arrival and departure of over 10,000 people through the port of Savannah, Georgia, who were still slaves in the years after the transatlantic slave trade was banned.
A third collection is called “Slave Ship Manifests from New Orleans”. This covers the years 1807 through 1860. The port of New Orleans was also an important Southern port. More than 100,000 people who were slaves arrived or departed through this port, and there are records for it.
“Freedmen’s Bureau Records” is another collection being released this month. The records here are from the years 1865 through 1878. The Freedmen’s Bureau was created after the Civil War was over as an aid to Reconstruction efforts. There are hundreds of thousands of records in this collection, that were once a part of the Freedmen’s Bureau. These are records that relate to people who were former slaves that got help from the Bureau to find work, to establish schools, to get medical care, to legalize a marriage, and more.
The “Slave Narratives” collection ranges from the years 1936 through 1938. This collection has documentation of the stories of 3,500 people who once were slaves. The stories are told in their own words, about their own, personal, lives. Together, these five new collections are now available, to help genealogists learn more about their families.
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