Freedman's Bureau Records Go Digital

Across nearly 150 years and astounding changes in American culture, records of the Freedman's Bureau, a agency that helped recently freed slaves after the Civil War, have now been digitized and are available online. The State of Virginia worked with the Black History Museum, to preserve hundreds of thousands of records. It is fitting that the state where human slavery was first initiated in what became the United States, and the state with the largest number of slaves, is now to the first to digitize the records and make them available online.

During the announcement ceremony, Governor Tim Kaine proclaimed,

"...this will be an invaluable way for people to connect to their past... if you destroy the past and you destroy records, you know, you destroy more than just pieces of paper...."

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