Renate Yarborough Sanders
While the nickname “Freedmen’s Bureau” may suggest a focus solely on the formerly enslaved, these records are an essential resource for all North Carolina researchers. Officially known as the “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands”, this federal agency documented a vast cross-section of post-Civil War society. This presentation explores how the Bureau served both “freedmen” – newly liberated people of African descent – and “refugees”, a term largely referring to white Southerners displaced by the conflict. In North Carolina, this work resulted in a massive paper trail, detailing the lives of ancestors from every demographic of the state’s population. Attendees will learn to access and leverage local and statewide record sets to uncover genealogically rich details, which provide a rare window into the daily lives of both Black and white families during the Reconstruction period in North Carolina, often allowing researchers to bridge gaps in timeline and to reconstruct ancestral communities.
(Image source: Microsoft Copilot, Outdoor Freedmen’s Bureau Field Office, generated May 2026. © Microsoft Copilot AI Image Generation. Used with permission.)
Available in the NCGS online store is North Carolina Research – Genealogy and Local History, the text for the NCGS Webinar Series. For more information about the speaker, please see our Flyer (pdf file).
You must be signed in to your NCGS membership account to view this resource.