The world’s largest digitized and searchable collection of Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedman’s Bank records is now available on Ancestry.com, providing free online access to information that can help the descendants of enslavers and formerly enslaved people in the U.S. learn more about their family histories.
This significant addition of more than 3.5 million records to the online family history resource can provide meaningful breakthroughs for African Americans trying to trace their family roots because the documents are likely the first time newly freed Black people appeared in records after emancipation in 1863. Prior to that, most enslaved people were excluded from the Census and federal documents.
The collection can be found here