Greetings Genfriends! For Day 2 of 7 Days of Juneteenth, we continue posting new record sets made during the first days of freedom.
Today, we have posted three new Beaufort County, SC 1868 voter registration precincts: Peeple’s Election District, Pocotaligo and Whippy Swamp:
Also new today are Freedmen’s Bureau transportation requests for South Carolina, made in 1865. These records offer a glimpse into where newly-freed ancestors were at the end of the Civil War – often far separated from home and loved ones.
Freedmen may have been far from home for a number of reasons. Perhaps they had escaped to Union forces during the war and wished to return home after they were freed, perhaps they had been separated from loved ones by the domestic slave trade, or perhaps they had served in the USCT and were returning home after the war’s end. For these and other reasons, hundreds of South Carolina Freedmen requested transportation in the early days after the war’s end, and these records may reveal more about an ancestor’s experience during the war years.
Notable among those listed in the transportation requests are Frank and Archibald Grimke (nephews of abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimke and later prominent leaders in the African American community), who requested transportation from Port Royal to New York:
Freedmen’s Bureau Lists of Requests for Transportation, South Carolina, 1865
Happy Ancestor Hunting from the crew at Lowcountry Africana!
