FamilySearch and others announce DiscoverFreedmen.org

In an article in the Deseret News from Salt Lake City, Utah entitled, "LDS Church, FamilySearch launch project to index Freedmen’s Bureau records of 4 million former slaves." The article explains about an announcement made on JuneTeenth as follows:

In a Juneteenth announcement Friday in Los Angeles that generated widespread excitement and jubilant parties nationwide, the LDS Church, FamilySearch.org and African-American history organizations announced the joint Freedmen’s Bureau Project, an effort to digitize 1.5 million handwritten records about former slaves and make them available for free online at a new website, discoverfreedmen.org.

The Indexing effort is aimed at organizations and individuals in the Black community.

Volunteers simply log on to discoverfreedmens.org, which is live now, pull up as many scanned documents as they like and enter the names and dates into the fields provided. A guide is available on the site. Free assistance is available at any of the 1,864 FamilySearch centers in the United States. 

There also is a Tips & Tricks guide for using the completed records for research as they become available. 

The goal is to have the records fully indexed for the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in late 2016.

For more information see the post by Thom Reed on the FamilySearch.org blog entitled, "Breaking Through the 1870 Brick Wall: The Significance of the Freedmen’s Bureau Records."