Genealogy researcher helping African-American families fill in the blanks

When Jackie Lugrand retired from her job with the Wichita school district in 2011, she worried she would have trouble keeping busy.

“As it turns out, that has not been a problem,” Lugrand said, laughing.

A couple of years after her retirement, the Wichita resident began working on genealogy projects in conjunction with the Kansas African American Museum, tracing family lineages for people who purchased a membership with the museum. She has worked with about 140 families in her three-year partnership with the museum, which she says she initially intended to last only three months.

“It was so much fun and there was so much interest that I said, ‘Well, we’ll continue (for three more months),’ ” she said. “That was 2013, and we’re still going.”

Her interest in her own family history, as well as what she calls a “passion for problem-solving,” led her into genealogy and, more recently, into a nationwide project to index key African-American historical records from the Freedmen’s Bureau.

The U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands – known as the Freedmen’s Bureau – operated from 1865 to 1872 to provide services for former slaves through offices in 15 states and the District of Columbia.

In its seven years, the bureau created millions of documents related to marriages, property claims, labor contracts, hospital records and more.

In June 2015, in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth – June 19, the annual commemoration of the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas in 1865 – nonprofit genealogy organization FamilySearch launched a volunteer project to index the entire collection of documents in time for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture’s opening at the end of this year.

Since then, nearly 17,000 volunteers, including Lugrand, have gone online to extract names and identifying information from the millions of scanned documents in order to make them easily searchable.

“This project will change how family history for African-Americans looks, because these are records people have not had access to before unless they had hours or months or years to be able to look through every record,” Lugrand said. “With these records indexed, it’s at your fingertips.”

Lugrand, who found out about the project while doing other genealogy research on FamilySearch, has been indexing records off and on for the past year, during which time the Freedman’s Bureau records have gone from 10 percent indexed to completely indexed as of June 20. She logged on to the database whenever she had a spare hour or two, she said.

“Sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep and I’d log in and index some records until I couldn’t see anymore,” she said.

Lugrand’s interest in genealogy grew out of a lifelong curiosity about her past, she said. When she was younger, she said, she enjoyed spending time with her grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles to listen to family stories.

One such family story that she managed to trace through historical documentation was that of her great-aunt, who, according to family lore, had cooked for President William H. Taft.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, right, an African-American woman in Topeka, Kansas, around 1910 — how in the world is she going to cook for a president in Washington, D.C.?’ ” Lugrand said. “But there was more to the story.”

In searching through old newspapers, Lugrand found an article saying Taft had visited the Topeka Country Club, where her great-aunt worked, and that she had, indeed, cooked for him. The story her family had handed down to her was true but had been missing key details – details Lugrand was able to reconstruct in her research.

Lugrand said one of the most exciting things she has seen in her research over the past several years is the increased online availability of resources.

“When I first started, I went through microfilm after microfilm after microfilm – I built up muscles in one arm just going through microfilm,” she said. “Now, you walk to your computer and there are records at your fingertips that you just wouldn’t believe.”

The newly completed Freedman’s Bureau project will be one such source of genealogical records. Later this year, organizers of the project will symbolically hand off the records to the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, at which point people searching for genealogical information will be able to type names into the online database of bureau records and find documents from schools, hospitals and other sources.

“To be able to put a surname in and find anything from the Freedmen’s Bureau records … just having that information is powerful, because it’s going to give you more than we’ve ever had in terms of African-American records,” Lugrand said.

This story was originally published July 3, 2016 at 9:29 AM with the headline "Genealogy researcher helping African-American families fill in the blanks."