RLP 122: African American Research Part 2

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 122 African American Research Part 2. 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 (40s):
Hello everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro, I’m Nicole Dyer, and I’m here with my mother accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hello.

Diana (52s):
Hi, Nicole. Nice to be talking with you today.

Nicole (56s):
Have you been working on lately?

Diana (58s):
Well, I’m just finishing up a client project that has been interesting. It’s native American and African-American and diving into the census records quite a bit because we have to start with that as our foundation, especially if the family has not done a lot of genealogy research and I’ve been looking for clues that the family lore, that there was a native American third great-grandmother is an actual fact. And so far, I haven’t really found a good clue and we did some DNA testing and it shows a little bit of Native American ancestry.

Diana (1m 39s):
So I’m just suspecting that the connection is further back. So I am for this client going to write up a really good, further research plan because you know, it’s not going to be solved in the 10 hours that I’ve been contracted to work with. And, you know, quite honestly, as you get further back in time, there’s less and less chance that you’ll actually find a record naming that Native American ancestry. So it’s been interesting.

Nicole (2m 10s):
Wow. Yeah, that’s really interesting and good luck with writing that up. 10 hours isn’t too long. So I’m not surprised that you’re writing a lot of plans for future research for the client and maybe they will want to go forward.

Diana (2m 23s):
Yeah. It’s hard for someone who hasn’t worked in genealogy or done a lot of research to understand how much time it takes and the methodology and procedures and things that we do. So it’s really helpful for them to have a clearly written out.

Nicole (2m 38s):
Yeah, well, I’m excited today because we get to continue our theme of African-American research and learn more about researching in government documents. So last time I asked you a question about the census instructions and if the enumerators were supposed to just look at the person and write down their race, or if they were supposed to ask, so what did you find out from them?

Diana (3m 3s):
That that was really interesting. And for anyone listening, if you want to know where to find those census instructions, you can just use that Google search and say 1870 census instructions or whatever. And it will come to the census.gov website and it has every census year and it brings up the instructions that the marshal or the census taker was to be using. So in the personal description area of the census, it says that columns four, five and six must in every case be filled with the age, sex or a color of the person enumerated, no return will be accepted when these spaces are left blank.

Diana (3m 50s):
And then when you go down to color, now, keep in mind, this is 1878. This is the first census that African-Americans were enumerated by name if they had been enslaved. And so under color, it says it must not be assumed that where nothing is written in this column white is to be understood. The column is always to be filled, be particularly careful in reporting the class Mulatto. The word is here generic and includes quadroons, octoroons and all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood. Important scientific results depend upon the correct determination of this class and schedules one and two. So what do you take from that?

Nicole (4m 31s):
Sounds like they had been leaving it blank before, and I have noticed that in previous years, you know, 1850, 1860, a lot of the times that race column was blank.

Diana (4m 41s):
Yes. And so it sounds like from this, that perhaps the census taker looked at the family and made their own decision. Well, it doesn’t really say that they are supposed to ask. They were probably supposed to ask, but I would guess that a lot of times they just made their own designation depending on what they saw on the family. So that was interesting. Then in 1880, it was the exact same wording. And then in 1900, 1910, 1920, they change it a bit and they give a little bit more specific. So they say write W for white, B for black, MU for mulatto, CH for Chinese, JP for Japanese, IN for Indian, for all persons not falling within one of these classes, write OT for other, and right on the left-hand margin of the schedule, the race of the person so indicated, and then special instructions for Census purposes.

Diana (5m 40s):
The term black with the B includes all persons who are evidently full-blooded Negros while the term Mulatto, MU includes all other persons having some proportion or perceptible trace of Negro blood. So they changed it up by 1900, that more specific, but still it’s, depending on who’s giving the information or the census taker, just deciding what they want to put in that column.

Nicole (6m 5s):
Yes. I’m now curious, the historian side of me wonders if there are any firsthand accounts of what it’s like when the Census Enumerator comes to your door and just describing what happens, you know, I’m just picturing that he probably would have asked the questions of the head of household.

Diana (6m 23s):
The other thing to think about is not everyone was probably super excited to be answering all these questions. And maybe in some instances, the census taker would just get as much information as possible. And then as he was walking away, fill it in the rest of it for what he thought, you know, if they didn’t want to answer all the questions, or if they got frustrated with the questions, they might not have wanted to give an answer and he wanted to fill in all the columns.

Nicole (6m 49s):
That’s true. Yeah, I know in the 1880 census instructions, I’ve read before that it talked about the enumerator is supposed to visit personally each dwelling and then by inquiry made to the head of household or have a family member here of deemed most credible and worthy of trust or of such individual living out of a family to obtain each and every item of information and all the particulars required by the act of March 3rd, 1879. So it sounds like they were supposed to get each of those pieces of information from the people who were reporting. And supposedly they were supposed to be credible people and not the three-year-old.

Diana (7m 33s):
And even if they’re the credible people like the wife or the husband, they can give different pieces of information because we do have that one census of our ancestor and they were enumerated twice in Texas because they moved in between the census enumerations. And the information is really different on those two censuses for the very same family. So I always think back to that about how it was the same household, just different people giving it, and it looks a lot different.

Nicole (8m 4s):
Yeah. People are going by middle names when the dad gives the information and first names when the mom gives it or something.

Diana (8m 11s):
Yep.

Nicole (8m 11s):
Yeah. I think it’s important to understand that when we’re reviewing these census records, that we use so much.

Diana (8m 18s):
It is. And especially if you are working, especially with this case, I’m working right now with the Native American and African-American and seeing what people identified themselves as, because they couldn’t put both races. They had to just put one. And so certainly there could be some Native American ancestry there as well, but the family identified more as Black. So I dunno. It’s interesting to think about.

Nicole (8m 43s):
That’s a good point, too. Okay, well, let’s go on to Land and Military Records in the federal government records regarding African Americans. So tell us about land records and how we can use these in our African American Research.

Diana (8m 59s):
Well, at first you may think that there probably wouldn’t be any land records, but there are several different collections of land records that an African American ancestor could be named in. And as reasonably exhaustive researchers, we want to look for everything. And if it’s a negative search, that’s okay. But at least we know we have tried. So let’s just talk about land in the United States. It has always been a huge draw. People were coming from Europe because they could get land where as they couldn’t, there was no land left to give out. But for African-Americans who were enslaved, did they want land?

Diana (9m 39s):
Well, of course they did. They wanted to have their own piece of land upon emancipation, or even before. And in some states before emancipation we had free people of color owning land. So one thing to keep in mind, if you do have an ancestor who was freed, they were in a minority and did have many obstacles. One of the main things was that this was seen as a threat to the institution of slavery. And as we get closer to the Civil War, we see so many states enacting these statutes that just put so many restrictions upon free people of color, because they didn’t want their slave population to think that they could ever be free and have land and, and be successful.

Diana (10m 28s):
So they really prohibited a lot of things. And one of those was land ownership in that era. Some exceptions are especially down in Louisiana. And one of the ones that I think is so interesting is the story of Coincoin who was the subject of Elizabeth Shown Mills’ book, Isle of Canes. And it tells the story of four generations of her family and they were land owners. They were African-American and he had some French ancestry as well, and they had thousands of acres. So they’re a notable example of an African-American family owning a lot of land, and they also owned slaves to help work that land.

Diana (11m 11s):
So that’s an exception to the rule, but for the most part, we don’t really have much African-American land ownership until after emancipation.

Nicole (11m 20s):
That makes sense. When they were able to purchase land after emancipation, are there some federal records that tell us about that? Or is it more county land records that we need to know?

Diana (11m 32s):
Yeah, there’s always records on the county level to work with, but for the federal land records, one of the interesting things that I learned about in my Institute class this summer that I had really never studied or learned about was the Port Royal Experiment. And this is the very first opening of land to the formerly enslaved African-Americans. And there are the Sea Islands of South Carolina and in 1861, the Union army captured those. We had all the plantation owners fleeing and their formerly enslaved people were invited to settle and purchase that land. The land was only a $1.25 per acre, but do you think any of those people who had been enslaved had any money.

Diana (12m 20s):
They didn’t. So it wasn’t necessarily that great of a deal for them, but they had a lot of missionaries from the north come down and the Union army, and they were trying to do this experiment, build schools, let’s build hospitals. Let’s try to give these people who are now free an opportunity to become educated, have better health, to farm on their own. And that was kind of the first time that those who had been slaves were able to own some land. It wasn’t super successful. And in the summer of 1865, President Andrew Johnson, you know, who succeeded President Lincoln, he began the process of returning all that land to the previous white owners.

Diana (13m 2s):
And so you have a situation where not all the white owners returned and many of the black landowners remained. So you might have family that were there and were part of that Port Royal Experiment. Next we have to consider the Homestead Act. And the Homestead Act of 1862 was for any adult citizen who was loyal to the United States. They could have 160 acres of federal land if they had a plan to improve it. And we’ve talked before on the podcast about the homesteading acts and locating your ancestor in those records.

Diana (13m 43s):
So think for a minute, 1862, well African-Americans were not United States citizens yet. I mean, obviously they were, but they weren’t given citizenship privileges. So they couldn’t own land yet, but this set the stage, this Homestead Act for when they did receive citizenship upon emancipation and in 1865 during the very last part of the Civil War General Sherman issued Special Field Order number 15. And there were a group of 20 African-American leaders who were trying to help their people. And they wanted to give people that had been freed, land.

Diana (14m 26s):
So the Special Field Order let the army sieze 400,000 acres of land. And it went all the way from Charleston, South Carolina, down through Georgia to the St John’s river of Florida. So the strip of land, it was all along the coast from the previous slaveholders. And it was to be distributed to the freed men. And they were each to get 40 acres. And you’ll hear about this a lot. And they called it 40 acres and a mule. That’s what we hear about it. But in researching it, there was never really a promise of a mule in the actual order.

Diana (15m 8s):
Historians think it’s because the army had all these extra army horses and mules, and they were being turned over to the Freedmen’s Bureau and that Bureau was supposed to help the Freedmen get this land. And perhaps they were divvying those out as well. So that’s kind of funny. Unfortunately, by the end of 1865, that Special Field Order number 15 was repealed by President Johnson and the majority of the land returned to the plantation owners.

Nicole (15m 39s):
That’s such a bummer.

Diana (15m 41s):
So after the failure, I mean, we’ve got a couple of things we can see that they were trying to get this land assigned, but things kind of kept failing. Then we have the Southern Homestead Act of 1866, and this was enacted by Congress. And it was to again, assist the newly emancipated African-Americans in land ownership. It was a little different from the 1862 Homestead Act because it could only be 80 acres instead of the 160. We’re talking 1866 and this was about the Southern states. So the majority of the African-Americans who’d been freed were in the south. And we still had states that had thousands of acres of land available for settlement.

Diana (16m 26s):
We had land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but there was one problem with this land. A lot of it was just unusable. That’s why it was still available in these federal lands states, no one had claimed it because they don’t want it. It was swampy or heavily forested. It wasn’t suited for the plantations, you know, growing cotton, all the things that they wanted to do in the south. So this was the kind of land that was still available. And the Northern politicians saw this as a great opportunity to offer the landless. And they banned the ex-Confederates from purchasing the land. So they were trying to make this available.

Diana (17m 6s):
It also couldn’t be purchased for railroads or timber operations, but only the homesteaders. And for two years, it would be for a tract of 80 acres. But again, remember there was a cost involved and for most of the formerly enslaved, they just didn’t have any money. Cost of the land was too high and the black codes and the Southern state legislatures still made it more difficult. So it sounds like a great opportunity, but again, it wasn’t as great as it sounds. However, there are records that were created, and that’s what we were talking about here. There were about 6,500 claims to these homesteads, and about a thousand of those resulted in land patents.

Diana (17m 55s):
So what do we know about those homestead applications?

Nicole (17m 59s):
Wow, yeah, that reminds me that you have to fill all the requirements and then you can patent the land at the end of the time. And if you improved the property and stuff,

Diana (18m 8s):
Right. And the really great records are not necessarily the land patents, which are single certificate saying that you have the patent to this land. The really great information is in those applications. So those are what we want to look for. And 6,500 claims, that’s a lot of information. And the thing that I have noticed in the land applications that I have gotten for some individuals are that they have witness statements in those saying, so-and-so has worked this land and he has a family and a house, and you can sometimes get some really good pictures of what the ancestor was doing.

Diana (18m 50s):
Sometimes they’ll talk about the kind of crops that they were planting and growing, or they’ll talk about the buildings that they put on the land. So we always want to seek out those records, whether they resulted in a land patent or not, they could have tried to make a claim.

Nicole (19m 6s):
I’m guessing that the land was kind of unusable. So a lot of them didn’t actually want to stay there.

Diana (19m 12s):
Exactly. If you have 80 acres of heavily wooded land and you have no tools, no resources, what are you going to do? That would be difficult.

Nicole (19m 21s):
Yeah. I guess it’s good that they tried making an effort to make some land available, but it sounds like they weren’t giving it away. It still costs money. Do you remember how much it cost?

Diana (19m 31s):
I think it might’ve been a $1.25, An acre.

Nicole (19m 34s):
Okay.

Diana (19m 35s):
But don’t quote me on that, but that is what the land was for the Port Royal Experiment and could have been the same for the homestead land.

Nicole (19m 44s):
Okay, I’m just going to Google it really fast because I’m so curious. Oh, wow. It was cheaper than that. It was $5 for 80 acres.

Diana (19m 52s):
Oh, well that’s cheap,

Nicole (19m 54s):
But still, if you haven’t had a chance to save money, you’ve been working your whole life and all of the proceeds have gone to your slave owner. Well, you would have to go start sharecropping, I guess, with your former plantation owner. Yeah.

Diana (20m 6s):
Because you’re also trying to feed your family and needing to purchase clothes and just everything you’re not used to ever having to provide for yourself or being able to provide and all of a sudden, now you’ve got to try to, to do that. Which brings us to the Freedmen’s Bureau. And we talked a lot about that last week and how it was established to help the new Freedmen and aid in their efforts to acquire land through all of these initiatives. And so the Bureau officials would act as intermediaries between the Freedmen and the land offices. And the result was the creation of many records related to the land.

Diana (20m 47s):
So these Bureau officials were supposed to kind of help out because the, the people at the land offices maybe wouldn’t want to be super helpful for an African-American coming in and wanting to fill out the paperwork. Or in many cases, probably didn’t know how to fill out the paperwork, didn’t know how to write or read. And so they would need help. And that’s what the Freedmen’s Bureau officials were to do. So those Freedmen’s Bureau records can be full of information about the land and this whole process. Our last episode talked all about those records and how to search them. So we won’t really talk any more about that, but let’s talk a little bit more about westerly migration.

Diana (21m 30s):
There was still a lot of land out west, so we’re talking 1870 and you’ve got land in all those Western states that is coming available for the Homestead Act. And so we will see that we have Freedmen going west and there were some all-black towns that offered a place of opportunity for these newly emancipated people. Well, I’ll just name them because it’s fun to look them up and learn about them. There was Nicodemus Kansas; Dearfield, Colorado; Sulley, South Dakota; Dewitty, Nebraska; Empire, Wyoming; and Blackton, New Mexico.

Diana (22m 13s):
Fascinating to learn about them.

Nicole (22m 15s):
Yeah, that’s really neat. And so it sounds like these were areas kind of that the Freedmen’s Bureau officials encouraged African-Americans to go to?

Diana (22m 24s):
I think it’s that whole thing about the push and pull of migration that we talked a lot about. If they’re getting word back to family in the Southeast saying, come out to Kansas, we’ve got a whole town here. That’s all African-American you probably had some people that went out first and others came later, you know, it was the pull of the new lands or being pushed out of where they were. There was a lot of not good things happening. So there were people basically being pushed out of their community and this offered them a place to go.

Nicole (22m 58s):
So, just kind of founded by the African-Americans who went there and then more people were eventually drawn there.

Diana (23m 4s):
Right. So we already talked a little bit about where to find the homestead records, but if you want to start searching from square one, what you do is go to the Bureau of Land Management website and they have a searchable index for the land patents that were successful. And if they are found in the index, you can see the image of the patent right there, download that, print that, and look on the map that they give you for where that land is. That’s always really fun, but if you want a more complete record, if you have a ancestor that actually patented land, then you’ll want to order the land entry case file from the national archives.

Diana (23m 46s):
And that’s where you get the rich information. So if you need more help with the federal land records, then you’ll want to see some of our articles on Family Locket, or we have podcasts where we talk all about how to get those records and a little bit more about the federal land records.

Nicole (24m 6s):
Yeah. Your articles on the homestead records were really helpful and interesting because I’ve never ordered an application from the National Archives for our homestead. And it was just really cool to see all the different records that were created, all the valuable pieces of information that you can find on them and just developing that mental picture of what the land was like at the time and understanding that.

Diana (24m 30s):
Right. So land, don’t discount it if you have an African-American that you’re researching, it’s always good to do the search and see if they could possibly be in these federal land records. Maybe there is somebody there that you had no idea had some land.

Nicole (24m 48s):
Great. So our next topic is military records. I know that there’ve been units of African-American soldiers in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. So can you tell us about what is available for researching this?

Diana (25m 3s):
With African-Americans in the military records they are in the same types of government records as their white counterparts. So everything we use for military records that we’ve talked about in the past, we’ve got pensions, bounty lands certificates, the compiled service records and military personnel files. So what we’re going to do is talk about what was the involvement of African-Americans in the conflicts that we’ve had in the United States. And if you want to search more or learn more about it, there’s some really great articles. The National Archives website has military resources, blacks in the military. And then there’s also a really in-depth article Wikipedia called Military History of African Americans that links you to many other articles and sources.

Diana (25m 53s):
So if you have an ancestor that you suspect served in a war, or there’s a family story that great great-grandfather was in the Civil War, it’s worthwhile to explore that further and see if you can find a record that the federal government created for that ancestor. So we’re just going to go briefly through the different conflicts we’ve had in the United States. And talk a little bit about the contributions that African Americans made to that.

Nicole (26m 24s):
okay.

Diana (26m 25s):
Starting with Colonial America and the Revolutionary War, we’re not going to see very many African-Americans in Colonial America because they were still enslaved, or indentured servants, sometimes they’re called, which is kind of another form of slavery. By the revolution however, some had earned their freedom or escaped from slavery. And this was the first conflict that actually saw a significant number of freed blacks recruited to serve in the militia. In fact, about 15% of the American troops consisted of African-American soldiers.

Nicole (27m 1s):
Wow.

Diana (27m 1s):
So any records that were created, you know, Revolutionary War pension files could have an African-American named. The next major war was the War of 1812, and the newly formed United States Congress passed four acts in 1792 that related to the military because they had this group of men that had fought. They had to figure out what their official status was going to be. So the second act stated that only free white able-bodied citizens were eligible for militia service and the excluded those of African ancestry.

Nicole (27m 42s):
Hmm.

Diana (27m 42s):
So, you know, that was kind of sad after the African-Americans helped win the war and then they were excluded, but then we have 1812 war and we have, again, that question of, should they be allowed to fight? One thing to know is that this was in the army, the 1792 prohibition against African-Americans, and in most state militias, but the Navy had no restrictions.

Nicole (28m 9s):
Interesting.

Diana (28m 9s):
That was so interesting to learn. The Navy suffered from a chronic shortage of men and the African-Americans were welcomed to aid in the fight against Britain. And then also in the War of 1812, we have Louisiana again, that exception, and they had all black militia units raised from their freed people of color population. So these were some exceptions to the Army’s ban on African-American service, even though there weren’t many that fought, there were some.

Nicole (28m 41s):
Well, that is so fascinating about the shortage of men for the Navy. And I guess I’m not too surprised. The Navy does seem like a difficult place, you know, very lonely out at sea and living in small quarters and the chance of drowning and danger that way and stuff if your boat is ruined in battle, that just shows to me the bravery of these African-American men who signed up for the Navy and were willing to fight and aid the country. Do you think there was hope that they would gain pay and land as part of their service?

Diana (29m 19s):
Well, part of the service was just having a better situation. If you were free, it gave you a job. And I would imagine that they were paid. Supposedly all of the soldiers in the army and all the sailors in the Navy were to be paid by the federal government and the promise of pensions and all that comes with that. So whether they actually received that or not, this may be another story, but I’m sure it was a promise that payment would definitely help to recruit them.

Nicole (29m 50s):
Right?

Diana (29m 50s):
So then we have the next conflict being the Mexican American war and the African-Americans were still serving in the Navy. And we still had the Louisiana battalion of free men of color. But by this time this was 1846. They were just relegated to being servants of the officers in the army. So during the Mexican war, we didn’t have any battalions that were actually fighting. Now, the Civil War is major conflict that changed everything. And at the beginning of the Civil War, African-Americans served only in the Union Navy. And the majority of these men were free blacks from the Northern states and Canada, but gradually their numbers swelled.

Diana (30m 33s):
And they began to include the recently enslaved men. And remember that militia act of 1792, they had not been allowed in the army, but finally in 1863, they recognized the need for more manpower. And they issued general order number 143, and they established the Bureau of Colored Troops. And then for the next two years of the Civil War, the US Colored Troops grew to include 175 regiments made up of free blacks and Freedmen. So we see a lot of African-American men fighting in the Civil War.

Diana (31m 14s):
And then there were some other interesting things, we had in the Confederate army a militia unit that consisted of those free men of color from Louisiana. This was disbanded in 1862 and then people of African descent, whether they were free or slaves were recruited as laborers. So you see a lot of African-Americans on the Confederate side, whether they want it to be or not.

Nicole (31m 40s):
Yeah. I know that’s a controversial topic whether or not enslaved people willingly fought for the Confederacy. So that’s an interesting point to bring up that they expanded that unit in 1862. And then turning those people into laborers instead.

Diana (31m 57s):
Yeah, it’s really complicated. It’s very complicated. The white legislators in the Southern states did not like having free people of color doing anything because they were examples, you know, for their enslaved population. And so they, they really cracked down on them and just did not want them doing anything. It’s really sad because there were so many that were educated and really wanted to help their people, and they just face the obstacle after obstacle. So at the end of the Civil War, some black troops were promised freedom in return for fighting for the Confederacy.

Diana (32m 38s):
So maybe that would be a motive to get some people to fight. And they would say, okay, you get your freedom if you’ll come fight for the Confederacy at the end of the war, but they never saw any combat just at all the other labor.

Nicole (32m 53s):
Right. Well, what about after the Civil War?

Diana (32m 58s):
So we have the Indian Wars after the Civil War, the United States had this huge army and what were they going to do with this army? Well, that’s where we see them sent out west to fight those poor Indian tribes that were out west that wanted to hang on to their land. And African-American soldiers were part of that. They became known as the Buffalo soldiers and they did a lot of building. They built roads and they guarded the US mail. They served in a variety of roles as that Western frontier was pushed further and further west. And then in 1898, we had the Spanish American War and we again have the Buffalo soldiers called up to service and there were volunteer army units and national guard units that consistent solely of African-Americans at this time.

Diana (33m 52s):
So 1898, this has been 30 years of freedom. And so we’ve got men that were never enslaved that were children of formerly enslaved people and wanting to volunteer and fight for their country. And then in World War One, we saw many African-Americans enlisting in the military, but everything was segregated. And so you’d have an entire African-American unit. And most of these did not see combat. Instead, they served again in those support roles, they built bridges roads and trench months. And in some of my research projects, I have seen that where the ancestor was in a unit and they were sent to France as part of World War One, the conflict there.

Diana (34m 41s):
And then they dug those trenches. You know, we all seen the movies or read books or heard about the horrible trench warfare in Europe for World War I. And so the African-American units were doing a lot of building those trenches,

Nicole (34m 57s):
That’s quite an interesting history up until then of the difficulties African-American soldiers faced in their military service. Did we see any things start to change by World War II?

Diana (35m 9s):
All through World War II, still segregated. And this is where you hear of some of these really famous units. Like the Tuskegee airmen, they fought was so much heart and valor. And eventually that did lead to desegregation. And finally, president Truman signed executive order 9981 in 1948, that abolished discrimination in all the United States military branches. So finally we could have whites and blacks fight in the same units, even though it had been abolished by that order, when we have the Korean war, the military had not yet desegregated the unit.

Diana (35m 49s):
So it’s one thing I guess, to issue an order and another thing for people to actually obey that order. So it had lots of prejudice and discrimination. It was not until the Vietnam War, where they were fully integrated into military units and where you would see African American soldiers fighting side by side with their white counterparts. This was part of the problem, Vietnam War with some of the racial tension and riots in the United States, because there was a public perception that the black soldiers were dying more than the white soldiers. And so that’s a whole other topic, but that did wear the ugly head of racial tension and caused a lot of rioting.

Diana (36m 35s):
So if you have an ancestor that could have fought in any of those engagements, it’s very worthwhile to seek out records because there is so much information. The federal government has kept a lot of records on the military as can be imagined.

Nicole (36m 54s):
Wow, that was just an interesting history of African-American serving men in the military in our country. And it is difficult to learn about the discrimination that they faced in the segregation, but I think it’s really important to learn about it and understand it. And of course, as we research, this will really help us to gain the historical context and, and understand what records we should look in and were created. So can you tell us some more ideas and strategies for locating military records?

Diana (37m 24s):
As I said, right at the beginning, these are in the same record collections, as we would look for any ancestors in United States, military records that are not separated out at all. And so we have the basic groups. We have the compiled Military Service Records, the pension records, the bounty land records and military personnel files. So what do you do to find out you maybe have this family story that your ancestor served. So you start at home, look for clues, maybe a metal or a newspaper clipping, discharge papers. I know I found my dad’s discharge papers, which were so interesting.

Diana (38m 4s):
You never know what’s going to be hanging around just in the home. And reach out to cousins, maybe somebody else has something. And then you can search those censuses that the United States took every 10 years. A lot of those asks about military service. So you can look at that. We always want to consider the time period and the war that an ancestor might have served in. And then we want to research the location of the ancestor at the time of the war, where were they living? How would their involvement have played into any military service? And the Research Wiki is a wonderful place to learn about different locations or record collections that would apply to the war, the time period and the locality.

Diana (38m 47s):
So you can go to the Wiki, look up any of the wars, look up their military record, informational page. And, and as in any record, you want to find the indexed collection first, and then you can order the records from the national archives and index collections are on all the major websites. You know, Ancestry has some, FamilySearch has some, Fold3 has a lot of military. So you can even find some of the full record sets on those websites. But if you find them on the index, there’s generally more at the National Archives you could order.

Nicole (39m 24s):
Wonderful. Well, that was a great overview of how to get military records and clues about military service. And I’m linking in the show notes to two podcast episodes we did with Michael Strauss, where he talks all about Military Service Records and Federal Pensions. So take a listen to those as well.

Diana (39m 43s):
Absolutely. Michael was our teacher for this portion of the IGHR Institute. And so we learned from the expert about military records, and it’s really fascinating to think of them in terms of the African-American men who sacrificed and served in the military. So if anyone has got an ancestor that you think could have been included in these records, you know, I highly encourage you to think outside the box a bit and do some research and see if maybe they’re included in some of these records. All right.

Nicole (40m 16s):
Hi, everyone. We hope you have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye bye.

Diana (40m 21s):
Bye. Bye everyone.

Nicole (40m 21s):
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 eCourse 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.