Interest Grows in Freedman’s Bank
Created in 1865 to protect newly freed slaves from swindlers and to instill in them habits of “thrift and industry,” the Freedman’s Savings & Trust Co. did neither, ultimately going belly-up with millions of dollars of their money. But now, more than a century later, its depositors’ records may help thousands of African Americans find their roots.
“What was really a tragedy has turned into a marvelous treasure,” said Elder John B. Dickson, western North American president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which undertook the task of transferring largely unusable microfilms onto a user-friendly CD-ROM. “That’s the beautiful part of a very sad moment in American history.”
The CD-ROM, now available to the public, represents 11 years of volunteer labor by 550 inmates at the Utah State Prison. They painstakingly alphabetized the names of 72,000 depositors and cross-indexed them with spouses, children, parents and other kin--480,000 names in all.
The church took on the project, Dickson said, because of its basic belief that “families are eternal. Things don’t end at death. We’re trying to make sure families connect and find their roots.”
“It’s an extraordinarily valuable set of documents,” said Eric Foner, a Columbia University history professor and expert on slavery, reconstruction and emancipation, who has independently studied the bank’s history.
After the collapse of Freedman’s Bank in 1874, handwritten records from most of its 37 branches were stashed away at the National Archives in Washington. Then, in the 1950s, the Mormon Church, long a leader in genealogical research, microfilmed them.
Neither organized nor indexed, they were of little use to anyone until 1989, when Marie Taylor, a researcher at the Family History Center in Salt Lake City, and Darius Gray, an African American church member, proposed bringing the files into the computer age. Together they became directors of the project.
“This was a great opportunity,” said Dickson in a telephone interview from Salt Lake City. “I think it has helped the African American community know how much we love and respect and appreciate them as people.”
To some, African Americans and the Mormon Church are strange bedfellows. Until the church’s “revelation on priesthood” in 1978, blacks could not become Mormon priests. But Charles Meigs Jr., a consultant on African American and Cherokee research at the L.A. Family History Center, said he was warmly welcomed when he came to volunteer at the center a decade ago.
Researching African American genealogy poses some unique challenges, Meigs said, including uncertainty about surnames, because when family members were sold to different plantation owners, they often took their new owners’ surnames.
Foner points out that “tracing people back to Africa is really impossible.” Once in America, the slaves, as chattel, had no legal status. Later, when they opened bank accounts, some gave only first names. But a number of ex-slaves named the plantations where they had worked on the bank’s pre-printed deposit forms, along with the plantation owners’ names, giving researchers a valuable geographic link in tracing families.
Meigs said the CD-ROM is one of few major sources available to those researching African American genealogy before 1870, the year of the first postwar slavery census. Others include Civil War pension records at the National Archives (200,000 African Americans fought for the Union) and the final rolls of the five civilized tribes--the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles--who assimilated escaped slaves and were themselves slaveholders.
Dickson said that the church is not trying to proselytize through the material, which historians are invited to use for their own research. The Mormon Church’s genealogical projects have sparked controversy in the past--for example, when it posthumously baptized Holocaust victims and listed them as Mormons on its genealogical records. A Holocaust survivors’ group pressured the church to stop, and the church removed the names from its index and agreed that baptism of these deceased Jews would be allowed only if they were direct ancestors of living church members or if the church had written approval from all living members of the deceased’s immediate family.
Foner’s interest in the CD is as a historian. From these records, he said, “You get a little profile of the black community at that moment. Say you are writing about Buford, S.C.; you could go to the records and get a good cross section of black people in that area at that time. Or say I’m studying black carpenters in the South.
“The fact is, the Mormons are the greatest collectors of genealogical information. I have found them extraordinarily helpful and generous in making material available to historians. This is a good example.”
Nevertheless, he said, “They have their own religious reasons for doing this. If you can find the names of your ancestors, you can turn them into Mormons and that will help them get into heaven, if you believe that. What they believe is their business. This is a great resource.”
The bank deposit records provide a fascinating glimpse into American history. Most slaves were denied education, and some depositors were able only to make an X. Free for the first time, they earned minimal wages doing what they could. Occupations listed include laundress, railroad car porter, cotton picker, wood chopper, waiter, shoemaker and cook. A farmhand reported on his deposit slip earnings of $140 a year.
Darnell Hunt, chairman of the sociology department and director of the African American studies program at USC, said not everyone is going to find their kin among depositors. He has not. “A lot of ex-slaves were sharecroppers trading in grain, in perpetual debt to the owner. Most African Americans weren’t exactly rolling in wages.” If your ancestors were “city folk,” he said, your chances of finding them among depositors are better.
Still, Hunt said, these records “provide links to the past that previously didn’t exist or were like needles in a haystack to find.”
Depositors duly noted beneficiaries. One bequeathed $1 to his son. Another named his wife as beneficiary, stipulating that she not be allowed to withdraw more than $10 at one time.
The bank form also asked depositors to specify complexion--there were some white depositors--place of birth and, for those who had served in the Civil War, regiment and company. One depositor, Jacob Reiley, was a cook for General Sherman.
Zechariah Alexander, a cook, wrote a poignant footnote on his deposit slip in the space for listing his father’s name: “Don’t known [sic]. Never saw him.” There is a Cassius Clay from Lexington, Ky., and a number of Rip Van Winkles.
A tragic family history was related by depositor Dilla Warren, 50. She described herself as a cripple who took in washing and sewed and knitted to support herself. She stated that her husband, parents and two sisters all had been sold into slavery, as well as two of her 15 children. Nine children had died. Her record may prove valuable, as it lists 21 names representing three generations of her star-crossed family.
Gerard McKay of Los Angeles, a retired DWP employee, was among those who stopped by the Family History Center recently to buy the CD. He hopes to learn more about his great-grandfather, William McKee, who fought in the Civil War. “He’s always been a legend in our family,” he said. He also hopes to solve the mystery of how the family name became McKay. “We never knew when, how or why.”
The collapse of the bank, which in its nine years received deposits of $57 million, left many depositors penniless and “set back the development of the African American community by many decades,” said Keith J. Atkinson, spokesman for the Mormon church’s Southern California area. About half of the depositors recouped 20% of their money; the rest got nothing. Some depositors and their descendants tried unsuccessfully for 30 years to get government reimbursement.
Overexpansion into 37 branches in 17 states, many of them in the South, was a factor in the collapse of the bank, which was headquartered in Washington, D.C. In addition, said Atkinson, “there were large loans made to white business people that were just simply never paid back.” In the depression of 1873, Foner said, “a lot of their loans were worthless . . . these unfortunate poor people [many of whom had deposits of only $20 or $30] were left without any recourse.” The large depositors who knew how to work the system fared best.
As the bank faltered, prominent African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass was persuaded to deposit $10,000 and was named president in an effort to reassure depositors. It wasn’t enough.
Nancy Ellen Carlberg, a genealogist at the L.A. Family History Center, said, “Several people have asked us if there’s any money available that they could go back and get.” There isn’t.
To start searching the CD, it’s necessary to know the names of adult family members living in America around the turn of the century and, Carlberg has found, “A lot of young people today don’t [even] know their grandparents’ names.”
Each CD entry contains both a family name and a record number that enables the researcher to access the original microfilm of the bank records at the L.A. Family History Center and perhaps get more information. (The microfilm can also be viewed at the National Archives-Pacific Region in Laguna Niguel.) Information on the CD may also provide a link to other records, such as those of specific counties.
As history and sociology, the bank failure was also significant. Because it was created by an act of Congress, depositors believed their funds were government-insured, USC’s Hunt said. “There was a tremendous amount of disappointment and sense of betrayal. I’m sure it must have had some impact on folk wisdom about what one does with one’s savings.”
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The Family History Center at 10741 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles ([310] 474-9990), is open from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. The CD, which costs about $7, is available by calling the center, or on the Internet at https://www.familysearch.org or by calling (800) 537-5971 and requesting item 50120.
