Freedmen's Bureau Records Name Families No Census Recorded

The federal agency's paperwork can name a freed ancestor years before the 1870 census could



The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, generally shortened to the Freedmen's Bureau, operated from 1865 to 1872 and left behind roughly 710 cubic feet of paperwork now held by the National Archives. Bureau agents wrote the names of the freedpeople they served into labor contracts, marriage registers, hospital rolls, school reports, and ration lists, so those records can name a formerly enslaved person years before that person had any chance of appearing in a federal census. Note that the Freedmen's Bureau is a different institution from the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, a private bank chartered the same year that also recorded freedpeople's family details; this article covers only the Bureau's own records.


Why the Bureau Kept Records at All


Congress created the Bureau inside the War Department in 1865 to help newly freed people and war refugees through the transition out of slavery, and President Andrew Johnson appointed Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard as its Commissioner. Congress renewed the Bureau twice, once over Johnson's veto, before closing most field offices by 1869 and abolishing the Bureau itself in 1872. A successor office kept processing Black soldiers' and sailors' bounty, back pay, and pension claims through 1879.


What Makes These Records Different From a Census


No federal census named an enslaved person before 1870. The 1850 and 1860 slave schedules recorded only age, sex, and color under the enslaver's name, and earlier censuses counted enslaved people only as a number in the enslaver's household. The 1870 census, taken 5 years after emancipation, was the first to list formerly enslaved people by their own names. Freedmen's Bureau paperwork closes that gap. A labor contract or marriage certificate signed in 1865 or 1866 can name someone who would not otherwise be named in a federal record until 1870, and only if that person was still there to be counted then. Some labor contracts and complaint files go further and name the freedperson's former enslaver directly, a detail no census page has ever recorded, which is why these records are often how researchers get past what is sometimes called the 1870 brick wall.


What the Records Actually Contain


Field office paperwork is where the personal detail lives. Headquarters records in Washington, DC are mostly administrative summaries, but field offices that dealt directly with freedpeople produced labor contracts, marriage certificates, hospital and school registers, ration rolls, and complaint files. Marriage records go back to 1861, gathered first by Union Army chaplains and then by Bureau field agents. A single labor contract sometimes lists an entire family working together, spouse and children included, with an age given for each. A typical Bureau file can include:


  • Full name of the formerly enslaved person
  • Age
  • Former enslaver's name
  • Spouse's name
  • Children's names and ages
  • Marriage date
  • Residence or plantation
  • Occupation and agreed wages
  • Reason for a hospital stay
  • School attended
  • Rations issued
  • Complaint or claim details
  • Names of witnesses or Bureau agents
  • Military unit


Where Coverage Runs Thin


The Bureau set up field or state-level offices in only 15 states and the District of Columbia: the 11 former Confederate states plus the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. Coverage varies by state within that group. Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware have only field-office-level microfilm, without the fuller assistant commissioner and superintendent of education series that Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and most of the former Confederacy have, a sign of the Bureau's lighter footprint in states that stayed in the Union. Bureau authority over abandoned land nominally reached Indian Territory too, but agents had a difficult, short-lived presence there, and that work ended once the United States signed separate 1866 treaties with the Five Tribes. Formerly enslaved people who had been held by tribal citizens are documented instead in tribal enrollment records.


Finding the Records Today


The National Archives holds the originals as Record Group 105, issued across more than two dozen microfilm publications by state and record type, backed by a 1973 preliminary inventory for the headquarters series and a companion inventory for the field offices.


FamilySearch has digitized and name-indexed the collection by state for free, though viewing many images there requires a free account. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture built its Freedmen's Bureau Search Portal on a 2016 crowdsourced indexing project, completed by more than 25,000 volunteers, plus an ongoing transcription of more than 1.7 million page images, so a single search there can match a name, place, or date, or any word in the transcribed text, though the crowdsourced data carries occasional typos and some badly faded pages may never be transcribed at all. Ancestry.com added its own free collection of more than 3.5 million combined Freedmen's Bureau and Freedman's Bank records in August 2021, also behind a free account.


Anything not yet digitized, or sometimes too damaged to read online, still has to be requested from the National Archives in Washington, DC, where the original pages are kept.



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