Registers of Letters Received
setName: label: See more items in
content: Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Mississippi, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1869
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Museum of African American History and Culture
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NMAAHC.FB.M826, Series 3
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: Another recordkeeping practice of the day was the entering of incoming communications into registers of letters received. The registers include such information as the name or office of the correspondent, the date of the letter, the place from which it was written, an abstract of its contents, the date of receipt of the letter, and the entry number assigned to it. Often there are notations in the left margin of the page in the register indicating action taken regarding the communication, such as the page number of an endorsement or a letter subsequently written in response to the letter received.

The entries in the five volumes of registers of letters received, June 1865–May 1869, are arranged alphabetically by initial letter of the surname or office of the sender and thereunder by date of receipt of the communication. Each entry was assigned a number, with a separate numerical sequence for each alphabetical division in the first four registers. The fifth register has a numerical sequence for each year within each alphabetical division.

Communications from staff officers, written at the direction of their commanding officers, are usually entered in the name of the superior officer. Letters from the executive departments of the U. S. Government are entered under the first letter of the department's or bureau's title: "W" for War Department, "P" for the President of the United States, and "R" for the headquarters of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Communications from the Assistant Commissioner's staff or subordinate officers in Mississippi are usually entered in the name of the sender.

There are name and subject indexes in the first register, and name and subject index books for the second register. The remaining registers have name index books.

Because the number of pages allotted to each alphabetical division in the registers often proved insufficient, it was necessary to continue the entries elsewhere in the volume. The National Archives has filmed the registers in corrected order so that the pages are no longer necessarily in numerical sequence. Blank pages have not been filmed.

The dates given for each register refer to the dates that the first and the last letters entered in that register were received in the office of the Assistant Commissioner. Although the inclusive dates received of the first three registers overlap, the first register contains only those letters written in 1865; the second register, those letters written in 1866; and the third register, those letters written in 1867.

Not all of the letters entered in the registers are still among the records of the Assistant Commissioner. Some letters were forwarded to the Bureau headquarters at Washington; others were referred to staff officers or sent to officers subordinate to the Assistant Commissioner. The National Archives has placed an asterisk in the registers near the entry numbers of the letters that are in the series of registered letters received. Often, related letters were filed together in the series of registered letters received. Notations in the registers, beneath the entry numbers of related letters filed together, indicate the location of the collective file in the series.