Press release, January 11, 2007: “Congressman Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo, San Francisco) today introduced legislation to ensure that many of the genealogical records involving the families of former slaves in this country will be preserved, digitized and catalogued…“Unlike most Americans, researching African-Americans family histories from the 19th Century has been hampered by the lack of well-catalogued birth, death, and marriage records. Instead, genealogists and descendants of these families must often try to identify the name of former slave owners, hoping that the owners kept records of pertinent information, such as births and deaths. Compounding this problem is the fact that most of these records are often inaccessible or poorly maintained.” The Preservation of Records of Servitude, Emancipation, and Post-Civil War Reconstruction Act (H.R 390) builds on the foundation of the Freedmen’s Bureau Records Preservation Act, which was passed unanimously by both the House and Senate in 2000 and which became Public Law 106-444. That law required the Archivist of the United States to create a searchable indexing system to catalogue the genealogical records from the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. H.R. 390 will augment the already highly useful catalogue created by the National Archives to protect countless other critically important historic documents.”