Skip to Main Content

African American Genealogy Resource Guide: Freedmen's Bureau and Freedmans Bank Records

This guide is to assist students who are studying genealogy within the context of African American history.

Books: Online and/or Microtext

The Freedmen's Bureau, 1865-1872.

One of the websites below, the Open Library, has digitized a small selection of the National Archive's microfilms of the Freedmen's Bureau records. In practice, this means for example that while the National Archives holds 23 rolls of microfilm for the Freedmen's Bureau Field Office records from the state of Arkansas, the Open Library only contains two digitized rolls (#7 and #17). Therefore, it is useful when choosing amongst what is available online, to look at the National Archives' (lengthy) descriptions and contents of those films. The descriptions put the records in context with the events of the Reconstruction era, and the contents of the reels/rolls broadly identify the type of record contained on that roll. This will help the user have a better idea, in advance, of what types of records they are scrolling through. Note: the image quality is dependent on the quality of the original record. It can be helpful to use the single page display, and the magnification features, when available.  NOTE: See the last box on this screen for a list of the digitized microfilm rolls (reels) at the openlibrary.org.

Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, 1865-1874.

Contemporaneous Newspaper Coverage