Providing Digital Access to the Freedmens Bureau

The National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Freedmen’s Bureau Project is a comprehensive initiative that has provided digital access to the Freedmen’s Bureau records. Previously, this important collection could only be accessed in person through the National Archives and Records Administration, with no way to search for specific people or topics. Smithsonian staff have worked with the public to index and transcribe the records to provide free full-text access to these invaluable records. To date over 600,000 pages of Freedmen’s Bureau records have been collaboratively transcribed by more than 60,000 individual volunteers. This data has been made available to the public for research in the Freedmen’s Bureau Search Portal. This groundbreaking search application is the result of more than a decade of data creation, processing, and cleaning; transcription; community engagement; and historical and genealogical research. The work of Smithsonian staff is ongoing and emerging technologies present exciting opportunities to expand access and continue to enable meaningful discoveries.