All posts tagged: Freedmens

Finding My Family in the Freedmen’s Bureau Archives

Finding My Family in the Freedmen’s Bureau Archives

Published by skeptic

In all my years doing research at the National Archives, I had never cried. That day in fall 2012, I had simply planned to examine documentary material that might help determine how the yet-to-be-built National Museum of African American History and Culture would explore and present the complicated history of American slavery and freedom. As I read through the papers of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—the Freedmen’s Bureau, as it’s usually called—I decided to see if I could find records from Wake County, North Carolina, where I knew some of my own enslaved ancestors had lived. I had few expectations because I knew so little about my family’s history. From a surviving wedding certificate for my paternal great-grandparents, I’d gotten the name of my earliest-known family member, an enslaved woman named Candis Bunch, my great-great-grandmother. But scrolling through rolls of microfilmed documents from the Raleigh office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, I realized the chances were remote that I would find my ancestor. Explore the December 2023 Issue Check out more from this …

Photographs by Elbert D. Howze: Freedmen’s Town

Photographs by Elbert D. Howze: Freedmen’s Town

Published by skeptic

MSS 0171—Elbert D. Howze Photographs, African American History Research Center, Houston Public Library How one photographer documented the disappearing landscape of Houston’s Fourth Ward By Dara T. Mathis Photographs by Elbert D. Howze November 13, 2023, 5:55 AM ET Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment. In 1984, Elbert D. Howze, a Black Vietnam War veteran in his 30s, was studying photography at the University of Houston. After class one day, he drove about 10 minutes northwest into Houston’s Fourth Ward. He wondered at the narrow streets, the tumbledown houses, and the proud community that seemed forgotten by the city. Howze had found his way to Freedmen’s Town, a once-bustling neighborhood settled by formerly enslaved people in 1866—one of many such enclaves founded in the Reconstruction era. Its streets were still paved with bricks that the newly free had laid in intricate patterns. Soon he was visiting the Fourth Ward with his camera “practically every day,” his widow, Barbara Howze, told me. Explore the December 2023 Issue …