Registers of Unbound Letters Received
setName: label: See more items in
content: Records of the Education Division of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1871
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: National Museum of African American History and Culture
identifier: label: Identifier
content: NMAAHC.FB.M803, Series 3
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: According to the record keeping practice of the time, letters received were entered in registers alphabetically by initial letter of surname or office of writer and thereunder chronologically by date of receipt. Each entry consists of the date the letter was received, the name or the office of the writer, the date the letter was written and the purpose of the letter. The 3 registers of letters received by the Education Division are dated from 1866 to 1871. The entries in register 1 (September 27, 1866–June 7, 1869) are arranged in a separate numerical sequence within each alphabetical section for each year. The entries in register 2 (May 27, l869–January 13, 1870) and register 3 (January 5, 1870–January 5, 1871) are in a continuous numerical sequence within each alphabetical section without regard to year. When a letter was written in reply and was copied in the press-copy books, a cross-reference designation such as "P B Vol. C 234" was placed in the lower left corner of the entry. The designation indicates that the reply is on page 234 in volume C of the press–copy letter book.

Name and subject indexes are filmed before the registers to which they relate. The entries in the indexes are of two types: if the letter was entered under the same alphabetical section in both the register and the index, only an entry number was given; if the letter was entered under a different alphabetical section, the combination of a letter and a number was used to indicate the section of the register in which the letter was entered. The entries in the indexes to register 1 indicate the page number in the register in which the letter was entered. The entries in the indexes to registers 2 and 3 indicate the entry (not page) number of the specific letter in the registers.

The National Archives has placed an asterisk beside the entry number in the registers if the letter is in the letters received file. The fact that no asterisk appears beside a specific entry does not necessarily mean that the letter is missing. A common practice of the Education Division was to enter school reports and schedules of schools and rental accounts in the registers as letters received and then to place the records in other series. These series of school reports and rental accounts are reproduced in Series 5.