A number of additional historical records are available containing detailed financial information about the condition of the Freedman’s Bank at various points in it’s history. The congressional record in particular contains a wealth of information on detailed audits of the bank’s finances. These records are often cited in secondary sources, but their details are sometimes difficult to track down as a primary source. These original sources have been collected and made available here in their entirety.
The dividend records consist of a series of ledger books. These ledgers record of the accounts existing after the failure of the bank for 21 different branches and the dividends paid to those accounts. Each available ledger represents a complete list of the accounts which were not closed at the time of the failure. The original scans are available through
Fraser at the St. Louis Fed. Additional details about these records as well as a transcription of the account numbers and deposit amounts can be found on this site.
The registers of signatures of depositors contain a rich historical record of new account openings at the Freedman’s Bank. The original records are stored at the National Archives and have been photographed and transcribed by
FamilySearch.org as a genealogical record. Details about working with these records as a validated data source are available here.
Passbooks were used by account holders to track their ongoing balances, much like a modern-day checkbook registers. The existing passbooks were collected as part of the effort to repay account holders following the bank’s failure. The physical passbooks are available at the National Archive in a four-box set. These records were photographed and transcribed as part of this project and both the high-resolution photos and the transcription are available here.