Tag: White

Records, Resources, and Repositories

Race and Identity in The Louisiana Statewide Death Index

| Karen Galloway|10 Comments
Louisiana Family

“White or Mexican(White)” is what I saw in a death record on Ancestry.com back in 2010 while researching my great grandmother Josephine Nelson, née St. Louis. This came as quite a surprise to me especially since I was new to genealogy and assumed that all of my ancestors were rich shade of brown like me and also from Louisiana, not Mexico! Needless to say, this label has left me and other family researchers perplexed. Based on the queries and information that I have seen,  this  label appears to have been given to deceased individuals throughout Louisiana regardless of their ethnicity or whether they identified as Creole or not. Their  families were probably unaware of how they had been recorded in this index and in other government records that tracked race, including census records. What also confused me was that around the same time that I discovered this death index record,…

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Records, Resources, and Repositories

Those “Squeaky Wheel” Ancestors | The Freedmen’s Bureau

| Karen Galloway|2 Comments
Image of Freedman in line at Field Office

“There’s no sense in complaining!”, “Your complaining to the wrong people”, or “Your complaints will fall on deaf ears!”. These are phrases I have sometimes  thought, heard,  or uttered throughout my life. Well at least a few of my ancestors felt that even in the deep south, during reconstruction, that justice would prevail and they sought justice would by lodging their complaints with the “system”.  In my ancestor’s case, the “system” was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands.  Popularly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency was established in 1865 by Congress to help former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (1861-65). Some 4 million slaves gained their freedom as a result of the Union victory in the war, which left many communities in ruins and destroyed the South’s plantation-based economy. The Freedmen’s Bureau provided food, housing and…

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