Ancestry Magazine

When Eliza Jones, a former slave living in South Carolina, went to register for a savings account in 1871, she couldn’t sign her name for identification, nor could the bank afford to take a picture of her. But the bank wanted some way to distinguish Eliza from other would-be claimants. So in a 19th-century version of identity-theft protection, the bank recorded Eliza’s answers to a series of personal questions.

Eliza answered the questions and in the process told the bank that she was born in Hardiman, Tennessee, to Charley and Natsey Price and that she had two siblings, Francis and Frank. She also told the bank her husband’s name— Lewis Jones—and her son’s—Billy. Her address was conveyed as “Corner of Madinson & 3rd.” As for occupation she labeled herself a 30-year-old cook working for G.J. Bowman. All of this plus one additional note—“scar on right cheek”— was recorded on a signature card and filed away.

Finding a record with this much information is a pipe dream for most family historians, but for the descendants of 480,000 black Americans who registered in one of 37 Freedman’s Banks established after the Civil War, it’s a reality. Signature cards with similar information were required for anyone wishing to open an account in one of the bank’s branches—and the records for 29 of those banks have been preserved and are searchable on Ancestry.com.

That’s not all. Ancestry.com has also gathered all of its resources for researching black history in its African American learning center.

What will you find? For starters, there’s a new African American census filter tool that searches all of the known terms census takers used to identify a black American (“black,” “colored,” “mulatto,” etc.). You’ll also find more than 3,500 slave narratives, a collection of photos from the National Archives, and so much more.

www.ancestry.com/aahistory