Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 DIGITAL IMAGES ONLINE OF TYPED NARRATIVES.
FROM THE SITE: 2300 first person accounts of slavery and 500 black and white photographs of former slaves... The published volumes containing edited slave narratives are arranged alphabetically by the state in which the interviews took place and are there under by the SURNAME of the INFORMANT (i.e. the slave).... Federal field workers were given instructions on what kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects. The result of which may sometimes be offensive to today's readers...
COMMENTARY:
Realize that the slaves interviewed were old people in their 80's and 90's.
I've had ONE genealogy project in which I believed I'd found the FAMILY of the owner of a slave who gave a narrative. The ex-slave's story was about being cruelly abused by a certain man who was likely one of this family's members in South Carolina. The North Carolina branch of this family had not owned slaves and my client said he'd been told by his father that they did not believe in slavery.
What a find if your ancestor is one of the 500 ex slaves whose photos appear.
For many Americans with Southern U.S. roots (though there were slaves in states not thought of as Southern) slave owners and/or slaves are part of their ancestry.
I suggest you scan through this collection just to get a feel for it. The collection is NOT inclusive of every ex-slave, just a sampling of those still alive and willing to be interviewed. Try scanning for names in your family. Tie this in with whatever census information. The place of interview is NOT always the place the person was enslaved.
The interviewing writers were told what questions to ask and did their best to record the stories as part of a Works Projects Administration job. If you have reason to believe one of your family members worked on this assignment, the writer's names appear also.
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