RLP 121: African American Research Part 1

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 121 African American Research Part One. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (45s):
Hello everyone. Welcome to the show today. I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of Research Like a Pro, and I’m here with my mother accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi, Diana, how are you?

Diana (56s):
Great, Nicole. It’s so fun to be here, chatting about our favorite thing, genealogy.

Nicole (1m 3s):
We’ve already been chatting about it for the last hour and just finally decided to press record.

Diana (1m 8s):
That’s why we started doing this podcast because we like to talk genealogy all the time. So what have you been working on?

Nicole (1m 17s):
Well, last night I had a really fun discovery and yesterday I was teaching the research planning lesson for the Research Like a Pro with DNA Study Group. And for that lesson, I had made a research plan for the next steps for what I would want to do with my project to discover the parents of Barsheba Tharp. So I’ve been writing a proof argument for that, but I just didn’t feel like I really had it all the way proved. I was really close, but I just felt like I needed a little more evidence to confirm that Barsheba was the daughter of Louis Tharp and his second wife, but Louis Tharp had a first wife and with Barsheba’s birth range, you know, there’s conflicting evidence. I thought maybe she would be the daughter of the first wife and that would make her a little bit older when she got married.

Nicole (2m 2s):
But if she was the daughter of the second wife, she was only 12 when she got married and had her first baby, which I thought was really young and really unlikely, but all the matches to descendants of that second wife were so much larger than the amount of shared centiMorgans with the matches for the first wife of Louis. So it just really seemed like she was the daughter of the second wife, Judy Vernon. Well, when I made my research plan for this lesson that I was giving yesterday, I had the idea to do some ancestral research, to extend the two wives’ pedigrees back a generation or two, and then see if I can find matches coming down from their siblings or their cousins and see if I can find maybe some Vernon matches that would show that it was Judy Vernon that was the mother even more strongly.

Nicole (2m 46s):
And I looked in GWorks, which has a list of all of the surnames for my test takers matches. And there weren’t a lot of Vernon matches that seemed applicable, they were from England. And then I saw in some of the family trees that people think that Judy Vernon’s mother is Elizabeth Blanton. So Blanton is kind of an unusual surname. So I decided to search in GWorks for that surname. And there were a lot of Blantons and in the trees, there were all these children who would be siblings to Elizabeth Blanton. So this would be Barsheba’s aunts and uncles. So as I started finding these surnames in the matches trees, I wanted to make sure they were in the right genetic networks.

Nicole (3m 28s):
So I went over to my network graph that Shelly Crawford at Connected DNA had made for me awhile ago, I had already found the descendants of Barsheba in this pink cluster. And then there was this tan cluster nearby that I didn’t know who the most recent common ancestor was for them. Well, all of these Blanton descendants were in that tan cluster that was very closely connected to Barsheba’s descendants in the pink cluster. So I was jumping out of my chair because I had discovered that Judy Vernon’s grandparents’ descendants are matching my test taker, giving more evidence that she was mother is Judy Vernon.

Diana (4m 6s):
Oh my goodness. That’s so great. That is that early 1800s making connections with DNA and in Tennessee, where there are no records. So great example of how to use DNA.

Nicole (4m 21s):
Yeah. You know, this was a tricky case because Judy Vernon’s family in Hawkins county, Tennessee, I couldn’t find a lot of connections, but there was that evidence in a tree, someone had found her parents were this Nathan Vernon and Elizabeth Blanton. And there’s a revolutionary war pension application that somebody has added on FamilySearch family tree that has evidence that Elizabeth Blanton is the daughter of these other Blanton’s and Hobbes. And so I just need to do a phase of traditional research on this Blanton family, and really nail down all of the children and connections there. And then I think I can add it to my proof argument as like a final section showing that Judy Vernon is the mother.

Diana (5m 3s):
Great. Yay. That’s so fun. I am just still a little disturbed though, that she was 12 years old when she had a child. That seems so young.

Nicole (5m 11s):
Yeah. No, I think one of the things that might’ve happened is that Judy Vernon and Louis got married after they got pregnant with her. I don’t know, but it could be, so who knows?

Diana (5m 24s):
That’s true. It can be tricky. We don’t really know all the situation and things could be off a little bit.

Nicole (5m 30s):
So all I know is that in 1834 Barsheba was living with John Norbert Dyer and she was aged 10 to 14 on that census. So I’m thinking she was probably in the 12 to 14 range since she was married. And that’s the same year that their first son was born, according to all of his life records. So I’m pretty sure that she was a young bride and had a child from age 12 to 14 sometime.

Diana (5m 56s):
Okay. Interesting.

Nicole (5m 57s):
One thing to note my locality research on Hawkins county, Tennessee, or all of Tennessee, I found that there was no minimum age requirement for women to be married.

Diana (6m 8s):
Yeah, that’s right. And there probably were not as many women there in those early years. And so that’s what happened, maybe very new areas.

Nicole (6m 17s):
I’ve used evidence in Virginia and North Carolina with the fathers have to give consent if they’re under a certain age, but there was no law like that in Tennessee, unfortunately, because it would’ve given me more evidence about fathers. Right. Well, that’s exciting. It’s always fun to make a new discovery and DNA is another piece of evidence that we use and we can certainly hope to make many more discoveries with our ancestry, right? Right. Well, that’s not even the topic for today’s podcast. So thanks for listening to me going down that story. But now we get to talk about something fun that you’ve been writing and learning about with African-American research.

Diana (6m 58s):
That’s right. So with the whole pandemic happening, all the genealogy institutes went virtual and I’ve been wanting to do an African-American Institute and really go in depth on this topic. And that way opened up for me this summer. And I was able to do the one through IGHR, which stands for the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research. And that is generally held in Georgia. But this year it was held virtually the last week of July. And I was really excited to take this and learn more about the records and more about Researching African Americans. So, you know, you might be wondering, well, what does this have to do with me?

Diana (7m 39s):
Whether you have ancestors who were African-Americans or not, you may eventually, as a genealogist run across documents mentioning African-Americans, you might find that you had a slave owner in your ancestry, or you might be doing a client project and discover that, you just never know where that’s going to pop up. And so it’s really useful to have a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of background about how to either research your own ancestors or to help others in their research. And so as a Southern researcher, of course, I run across these records and I have clients that have African-American ancestry.

Diana (8m 20s):
And so I do those projects regularly, and I really wanted to learn more from experts. And this course was taught by Dr. Debra Abbott, who is a wonderful teacher. And she put together a really great group of instructors who really are experts in their topics. So I decided to write blog posts about some of the things that I learned, because I found that helps me to get the information that I’ve learned in an Institute down into my brain. It’s one thing to watch a webinar and think, yeah, that’s really great. But until you use a record type, you don’t internalize that and you don’t understand it as well.

Diana (9m 1s):
And so that was my purpose in writing about everything that I learned. And now we’re going to talk about it on the podcast. So today we are going to talk about the census and we’re going to talk about the Freedman Bureau records and the Freedman’s bank records. So I do want to mention that this Institute was all about Government Documents. The title of it was Researching African American Ancestors, Government Documents and Advanced Tools. So you might think, okay, Government Documents, what does that mean? Well, this one was about federal documents. And of course, with African-American research, you want to start on the local level and gather everything you can with county records, you know, probate and court records or church records, maybe even on the township level, but this whole course was more about what the federal government created.

Diana (10m 1s):
And so that kind of put a focus on this course. That was a little different than some of the other African-American research courses out there.

Nicole (10m 11s):
How wonderful. So did you just take the record types that you learned about and then play with them and practice with them as you were writing these blog posts?

Diana (10m 19s):
I did. Some of them I have used before in client projects than others were new to me, or I’d heard of them, but I hadn’t explored them much. So it helped me to explore some of the ones that we’re going to talk about and see the use of see where they’re located, you know, with any kind of record, everyone just wants to know where to go find it, right. It’s like, okay, that’s great. There’s a record out there, but how do I find it? How do I actually use it? And I appreciated that. We learned that as well. And so many of these records are much more accessible than they used to be, which is wonderful.

Nicole (10m 55s):
Great. I think all of our listeners out there who are researching African American ancestors are going to love this series, right? So let’s talk about the Federal Census. So we’re focusing on records created by the federal government in the United States. So of course the Federal Census is a record type that we use quite often in our research. So what is useful in the Federal Census record group for African American Research?

Diana (11m 22s):
Well, we want to start with the censuses that are closest to the family. So that would be 1940. And then you work your way back. You have to set that solid foundation. And the reason why is naming can be tricky. So let’s think back to the era of slavery. African-Americans, enslaved people did not have surnames, generally. If they did have a surname, it was known within the family, but it wasn’t used in any the records. So upon emancipation, they took a surname and it could have been their former enslaver, or it could have been a name prominent in the community.

Diana (12m 5s):
There’s no reason that they had to take a certain name, they could choose. And so you might find a family in the 1870 census, the very first census to list all the formerly enslaved individuals by name. And you could find a surname there with the family, but then by 1880, they had decided they wanted to use different surnames. And the way you would identify them is by family groups and looking at their first names. So if you don’t understand that you can get very confused and you could totally lose track of where people ended up. I have done projects where I have found brothers in the same household with different surnames and granted they could have different fathers and maybe that’s why they use different surnames.

Diana (12m 54s):
But then in the next census, they were all using the same surname. So we have to really think outside the box when we’re looking at that 1870 and 1880 census, and then even going up to 1900 census, we look for those families as groups. This is where that FAN club research becomes all important.

Nicole (13m 16s):
Wow. That’s fantastic. What is the next record type that you would recommend?

Diana (13m 24s):
Well, something to think about that was emphasized in our course was that not all African-Americans were enslaved, there was a population of free people of color, as they were called. And you’ll see that terminology a lot in the records or when we’re discussing that. And they were enumerated by name in the census prior to emancipation. So you don’t need to assume that if you find African-American ancestry, that they were enslaved, they could have been free people of color. I know I did a project a couple of years ago for a gentlemen and one of his lines had been enslaved in Virginia and the other line were all free people of color in, I believe Pennsylvania, clear back to about 1800.

Diana (14m 10s):
And so it was really interesting to see the two different lines in just his genealogy. So it’s just important to keep your mind open with that possibility as well. And one thing that was discussed a bit also in terms of the census was the column for race. And sometimes we want to look at that and say, okay, well, they’re black here, but in the next census they’re listed as mulatto. And then they’re back to black and then you can have all these different designations. And so it was discussed that we should not put a lot of credence into that. It would just be what the enumerator was thinking.

Diana (14m 52s):
Often the enumerator would just look at the people and the color of the skin and make a designation. And so just like anything in the census, we have to be careful with how much we draw from them.

Nicole (15m 3s):
Wow. That’s really interesting. Do you know if the census instructions told the enumerator or the Marshall to ask the person what their race was or if they were just supposed to look at them and then write it down?

Diana (15m 13s):
That is a great question. And I don’t remember if we discussed that or not, and I have not looked at the instructions. So…

Nicole (15m 20s):
Look, cause I’m curious now, because I know that the instructions were pretty clear on like you’re supposed to ask the head of the household, but maybe it didn’t say specifically for that column, you know, ask them what their race is or write down whatever you think it is.

Diana (15m 35s):
Yeah. I’m very curious now that you bring that up. Well, what about prior to emancipation in 1850 and 1860, there were separate slave schedules taken, but unfortunately they didn’t list a lot of information. They give the gender and the age, they don’t give names. And we learned that you should use a five-year range for analyzing the family groups. So don’t just assume that because a young man was listed as 15, he really was 15. He could be anywhere from 10 to 20. So you have to really broaden your range for thinking about ages.

Diana (16m 19s):
But then what you do is you take that information and compare it to the 1870 census where you do get an exact age. However, again, exact ages may not have been known. So again, you work with family groups. And so if you see a family group in a slave schedule and it looks like it was possibly a mother and a father and three children of a certain age, and then you find that same type of a family group in the 1870 census in the exact same location, perhaps with the name of the slave owner, then that could help you to make some connections. So that’s something to think about when you’re trying to match up those slave schedule markings with records after that, or even as you’re trying to match those up with something like a probate record where the enslaved were named and maybe an age given, you have to use those slave schedules with other records to try to figure out and give you evidence for peer research.

Diana (17m 22s):
So you could see that the ancestor you are researching was in an 1850 slave schedule, and then you find a probate record when the slave owner died, and do you think that was the ancestor named in there, anyway, you put together all these pieces to try to reconstruct families and identities.

Nicole (17m 44s):
Yeah. That sounds somewhat similar to pre-1850 census research where you just have tick marks, but even more complicated because you don’t even have the surname of the slave. You just have the name of the slave owner and you’re right, like they didn’t have often the right age in there. So how tricky to correlate all these different little pieces of evidence that are a little bit fuzzy, but sounds like correlating them altogether can really build a good case.

Diana (18m 13s):
It can, you can actually make the connections and you can bring things together. So one of the cases that I worked on, there was in the 1870 census, these two brothers that had different surnames that we had their first names. And there was a probate record in the 1850s with those same two first names and looking at the slave schedules and their ages on those, they were young boys. And then seeing how old they were in 1870, it really correlated and their names are a little bit unusual. So the two together on both of those lists in the same location, but were some good pieces of evidence that these were the same individuals.

Nicole (18m 58s):
That’s great. All right, let’s move to another record type. Now the next one is Freedmen’s Bureau records. So I’m sure a lot of our listeners have heard of this, but maybe haven’t used the record group. It’s been newly indexed at FamilySearch so it’s much more accessible now, which is exciting. So can you tell us about kind of the background with this record group and what it is?

Diana (19m 25s):
Yeah. So at the end of the Civil War, they established what we call the Freedmen’s Bureau. The full title is the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. And this was established to aid the millions of formerly enslaved African-Americans. It didn’t operate long, only from 1865 to 1872. And it covered the Southern states, as you would imagine, as well as the District of Columbia and operated on three levels: national, state, and local. So I thought that was very interesting that there were these different jurisdictions within this set of documents.

Diana (20m 5s):
And it’s always important to understand those different levels. And we learned a lot about that in our course, how important it was to understand what records were kept on each level, where we would want to find the people and the people are really found in the local field offices. So those are the ones most likely to hold documents for specific individuals. The national and state levels were more correspondence between the field officers and the people over it in Washington, DC. So more bureaucratic type records, but the ones actually dealing with individuals were on the local level, which makes sense. One of the things that you have to keep in mind is not only did this include African-Americans, but it also include the southerners, European Americans, former slave owners who were trying to contract with their former slaves to come work the land, because you’ve got a plantation owner, he’s got thousands of acres of cotton that needs to be harvested.

Diana (21m 7s):
He wants to hire back all of his formerly enslaved people. And so they were required to do contracts. And so you are going to find all types of people in these records. So if you have a Southern ancestor, you might want to check those and see if your ancestor was trying to get some help trying to reclaim land that he’d lost, or if he was trying to hire workers to come work for him. So how do we find those? That’s always the big question. And before FamilySearch digitized those and did some indexing, you had to go to the National Archives, which has all of the original records and it was difficult.

Diana (21m 48s):
And so it has really opened up this type of research.

Nicole (21m 52s):
When I have used the Freedmen’s Bureau a little bit, I found it was kind of difficult to figure out what local county or town or area that the record was covering. So how do you figure that out?

Diana (22m 7s):
There is a wonderful website and it’s called Mapping the Freedmen’s Bureau. If you go to that, there is an interactive map and it’s so fun to look at it and to play with it has little icons for every local field office. And so you can go to your county or your area where your ancestors lived or where you think they lived. And you can look at this map and click on the little icon to pick up the actual name of the field office. And then right there, it will have a link to that FamilySearch digitized roll from the National Archives.

Diana (22m 49s):
So it’s amazing. Right from the map on Mapping the Freedmen’s Bureau, you click on the field office and the link and it takes you to the records. So it’s really great. Now, one thing to keep in mind is you might have to check multiple field offices. So it was just like anything. We always expand our research to the neighboring counties as well. This is the same idea. Say your ancestor lived in a certain county in Texas, but there was no field office in that county. You would want to explore the field offices nearby because that might’ve been where the records are. So you have to really look at the map, which is why it’s so helpful to think, okay, let’s go 30 miles out from the location and then maybe go 50 miles out from the location and explore all the different records for different field offices, kind of in a circle around where the ancestor was living.

Nicole (23m 44s):
Yeah, I’m looking at this and zooming in on the field office that I had used Marshall, Texas. And the only way that I could figure out if this was related to the people in my family was looking at the very beginning of the microfilm, where it said the three counties that, that field office covered. So that’s kind of how I figured it out, but this would be a much faster way to just see where your ancestors lived, zoom in on this map and then see the local field office names, and then go look at those records.

Diana (24m 16s):
Exactly. And the microfilm does help you a bit. There’s a main thing that you can click on and it shows all the different counties that are served. And it has a link to the descriptive pamphlet, which is put out by the National Archives. That gives you a really nice table of contents and description of what is in that. And you can also find the descriptive pamphlet over on the National Archives website. And you can click on just the one for the state. So for instance, if I’m interested in Alabama just to see what kind of records were kept, I can go to the descriptive pamphlet and see what’s there. There’s a lot of helps out there, but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to be really easy.

Diana (25m 0s):
So this is where you’re really going to want to keep a good research log and track exactly what you searched, because you’re going to be looking at a variety of records and you’ll want to know that yes, you have looked through all of the records for this field office and either you found something or you didn’t, so you can easily get really discouraged if you’re not keeping good records and knowing exactly what you’re researching. Yeah.

Nicole (25m 26s):
Yeah. Good idea. To be keeping track of those negative searches when you’re trying a new record type, that’s got unfamiliar field office names, and you’re just learning how to use.

Diana (25m 37s):
Yeah. So let’s just talk a little bit about what kind of records are there, I mean, everybody wants to know what kind of records could I be finding? So keep in mind what was going on. So we are talking about people that have been slaves and they now have been emancipated. What did they need? And what are the government thinks that they need? Well, they were looking for work for one thing. And there was a lot of illness and hunger. The south have just been devastated by this horrible war. Some of them had been in the United States colored troops, and they wanted pay because they hadn’t been paid. They wanted to finally educate their children, the Black Codes of the south prohibited education for so many years.

Diana (26m 23s):
And so finally they wanted to get their children educated so that they could have a better life. And so you’re going to see all these types of situations addressed. They also wanted to legalize marriages, they had formed connections and had informal type marriages, but they wanted to get those legalized. Often people were also trying to reunite with lost family members and they would come to the field office and try to put out a request for a child who’d been sold away. I mean, so many heart-wrenching situations, those records can be just about anything. I like that on the website, we’ve been talking about, Mapping the Freedmen’s Bureau, that they have got some really neat examples of records.

Diana (27m 11s):
So you can kind of get a little idea about what types of things you might find. There’s an affidavit of identity for a man who is trying to claim a military bounty. So he gives all sorts of information about his past life, his name and who was his owner and his birthdate and family members so much good genealogical information.

Nicole (27m 39s):
Wow. That is.

Diana (27m 39s):
So it’s fun to just go look and see what kind of things might be in the records. And then also just to explore and browse through the records on your own.

Nicole (27m 50s):
Yeah. That’s always a really good idea to get familiar with the record set, looking at some of the images, seeing what’s there. The one that I looked at in the Marshall field office in Texas, it was a lawsuit between a woman and a man about their crop. They, I think were disagreeing. I don’t know if they were formerly married and divorced or if they were just related because they have the same surname, but the man was suing the woman or something for part of the proceeds of the crop they had raised.

Diana (28m 18s):
That’s an interesting one. Well, if you’re wondering what is available in your state, I really good place to start is with the descriptive pamphlet for the state, because it will tell you how the Freedmen’s Bureau was working within that state. There seems to be a difference in geographical areas. So it’ll give you a really good solid foundation to actually read that pamphlet. I know sometimes they want to jump to the records without learning about the records, but in this case it would really serve you well to go read the pamphlet for the state. It’ll tell you the coverage of the records, and it’ll give you a history of that area after emancipation, because every single area was a little bit different.

Diana (29m 1s):
And so that’ll give you a good solid foundation for your research. And I’m looking at the one on Texas, and there were a lot of records on education that was interesting. A lot of miscellaneous records on schools and teachers and expenditures. So I spent a little time learning about the records and getting yourself organized before you jump into researching,

Nicole (29m 27s):
Just like what we teach in Research Like a Pro with the locality research and learning about what’s available and the history that seems like a really valuable resource, those pamphlets.

Diana (29m 37s):
Yeah. And that would be a great place to put a link to those would be in your locality guide.

Nicole (29m 44s):
Yeah. So each state has their own pamphlet?

Diana (29m 46s):
Yes. And they’re on the National Archives, they’re PDFs and they give you the information you need. It’s like a, they call it a table of contents. So I’ll just say this set of records covers these years and this is what you’ll expect to find in them. Great. So that’s very helpful. Well, should we talk about the Freedmen’s Bank records now? Yep. Let’s do that. So the federal government also created another set of records because they set up something called the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company. And this was an act of Congress on March 3rd, 1865. And it’s commonly called the Freedmen’s Bank.

Diana (30m 26s):
It also only operated for a select number of years from 1865 to 1874. And it was supposed to be an opportunity for the freed enslaved people and African-Americans who had served in the military to open banking accounts. There are a lot of records that were created by that FamilySearch has got a really nice article on their research Wiki, all about the Freedmen’s Bank records. And they tell all about the record collection. That’s on FamilySearch, that’s indexed and imaged. Now remember what we talked about with names before on the census records, you may not know exactly what name your ancestor was going by if they are in those Freedmen’s Bank records.

Diana (31m 11s):
So again, sometimes we search those indexes by the name we think, and we’re disappointed when we don’t find anything. And we just think my person wasn’t there, but maybe they were using a different name or maybe we need to expand our search to the FAN Club and look for other family members who could be in there.

Nicole (31m 28s):
And so that is a good tip to really think outside the box on what names they could have been using.

Diana (31m 35s):
Yeah. So how many people are we talking about here? Well, the FamilySearch Wiki states that the depositers included about 67,000 African-Americans. So that sounds like a lot, but in reality, that’s only 2% of the former slave population, but it is 2%. In addition, there were thousands of non African-Americans who made deposits at the bank. This is really interesting. These were primarily immigrants born in the British Isles, Scandinavia and continental Europe. They’ve had to list the names of close relatives. And so altogether the records list about 480,000 names.

Diana (32m 16s):
So an interesting collection and the form gave them space to list so much good genealogical information, their birth, residence, age, complexion, which is interesting, occupation, wife, children, and parents. So things that we just all really want to know, they’ll search, such every, a one of those is such good information.

Nicole (32m 41s):
That’s amazing.

Diana (32m 41s):
So let’s just look at an actual example. The example is for a gentleman named Elias Webb, he was born in Anderson district, South Carolina. He’s currently living in Port Gibson, Mississippi. So right there. Wow. That’s a good connection. Right? South Carolina to Mississippi, the migration of the enslaved is often difficult because they were brought west with their slave owners. And sometimes it can be difficult, tracing them back. And so that’s great information right there. We get that he was age 34, he’s black and a laborer. He worked for himself. He has no wife or children.

Diana (33m 22s):
But here is something interesting, he served in Company C at the 51st US Colored Infantry. So he was to get pay, you know, they were to be paid for their service in the military. And that’s why he’s got a record in the bank. But the other really great thing that’s probably even the greatest is that he lists family. His father was Moses. His mother was Rachel. His brothers were Green Webb, Jeremiah Webb, Marcus Webb, and Scipio Louis. Hmm. Isn’t that interesting. So right there, we have a different surname with a brother named Louis and then he had three sisters, Emmeline, Mary and Amanda, all Webbs.

Nicole (34m 6s):
That’s fantastic. And the fact that the parents’ surnames are not listed makes me wonder if we should just assume they were Webb or if they’re not listed because they didn’t have surnames because they were enslaved.

Diana (34m 18s):
And that could very well. Be if this is 1868, he was 34, so he would have been born into slavery, I would imagine. He could have been a free person of color, but his parents probably were enslaved, which is why we don’t have a surname. So we have a lot of clues from this one record. Now, what if you were Emmeline Webb. Well, you would not have the record, but you are listed in that family group. There are a lot of people there, right there in that record.

Nicole (34m 52s):
So are the names of the siblings and the parents indexed as well at FamilySearch so I could type in my ancestor, Emeline Webb, and still get to this record for her brother Elias?

Diana (35m 1s):
Yes. Every one of those is named. And so when you type in Emmeline, you get that same record and you get to see that her brother was Elias and that his parents were Moses and Rachel. But I don’t think we can jump to the conclusion that those would necessarily be her parents or maybe it’s her mother, but maybe not the same father. We have to be cognizant of how families were separated and different situations that happened. But it certainly is wonderful that they have indexed all of those names,

Nicole (35m 36s):
That is wonderful. Well, that was a fun episode. Thank you for teaching us so much about these federal records sets that are available to research African-American ancestors, the census, the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Freedmen’s Bank. This is a good start.

Diana (35m 52s):
Right? We’ll link to the blog post in the show notes. And I have a lot of links to the different websites and collections that we’ve talked about so that you can go try it out for yourself and do a little exploring. But like we mentioned a few times in the podcast, this really has to be done with focus, research, keeping really good track of where you search using your locality guide to make notes about the location. This is hard research. It’s not easy. So you want to really follow the Research Like a Pro process to make some good progress.

Nicole (36m 25s):
Great. Well, thank you for that. And we hope all of you listening will have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. All right. Bye

Diana (36m 34s):
Bye everyone.

Nicole (36m 35s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our Research Like a Pro online course or join our next Study Group. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com to share your progress and ask questions. Join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our e-course or Study Group. If you like what you heard and would like to support this podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.