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Research Rationale
Problems with Documents
Introduction
The documents, nearly a century and a half old, rest in the narrow
stacks at the National Archives Building in Washington,DC. The records are a rich source of
documentation for the black experience in America for the second half of the nineteenth century.
Over the years, historians,
social scientists, and genealogists have used these increasingly fragile
records to study and document the social and economic experiences of blacks
in America
during slavery and freedom as well as the federal government's policies
toward them following the Civil War. In recent years, however, more and
more African American genealogists and family historians, with a great deal
of frustration and varying degrees of success, have attempted to use the
records for ancestral research. To do so, they had to come to Washington.
This limited access has added to researcher frustration, and with frequent
handling, the original records have become even more fragile. Some are
torn, some even crumbling. Others are in good shape. Another problem with
the Freedmen's Bureau records has been the lack of personal name indexes
among the bureau's files that would allow easy access to the records when
searching for freedmen and their families. In the absence of such indexes,
researchers can spend countless hours searching through records that may or
may not contain information about their ancestors. During the period when
these records were created there was a shortage of paper. Subsequently,
many of these records contain writing on both sides of the paper, writing
in the margins; some of the writing is upside-down and written between
lines. Clearly, it would be impossible to use optical character recognition
(OCR)
Problems with Current Techniques
Though the current microfilming and indexing of the Freedmen's Bureau
records by NARA and others will make genuine strides toward preserving this
valuable national asset, these efforts will do little toward "making
these records easily accessible to the public"; as The Freedmen's
Bureau Records Preservation Act of 2000 calls for. Further, the efforts
will not make these records available to a wide variety of possible users.
Also, the process of extracting knowledge from these documents could prove
to be extremely challenging. One of the many practical uses of the
Freedmen's Bureau records is the traversal of the records in order to determine
one's ancestral tree. While this in itself may not be a very difficult
task, the sheer volume of information stored in the records is daunting.
The Bureau records hold hundreds of thousands of original documents,
certificates, and letters that are stored in different states. This is a
major hindrance to anyone trying to use the records. Not only are there
numerous records for a researcher to consider, but also the records are all
hand-written. This causes another problem, because now, the penmanship of
the documenter is of great importance. If the person recording the
information had illegible calligraphy, then it would be difficult to
positively discern the text. One additional problem associated with the
records is the illiteracy of the freed slaves and their inability to give
the spelling of their names, thereby leaving the responsibility of
determining the spelling of the person's name up to the recorder. This
causes the traversal of the information to be even more difficult as there
might exist various spellings or variants of the same name, e.g. Susan,
Susanne and Suzan.
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