The Library of Congress has a great new online collection that will be of interest to anyone researching Black American Genealogy. The "Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-38" section of the Library’s Web site contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.

This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs Divisions of the Library of Congress. It includes more than 200 photographs from the Prints and Photographs Division that are now available to the public for the first time. "Born in Slavery" was made possible by a major gift from the Citigroup Foundation.

Quoting from the Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives by Norman R. Yetman:

In 1855, John Little, a fugitive slave who had escaped to Canada, uttered this perceptive commentary upon attempts to convey the realities of the existence that he had fled: "Tisn't he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is—'tis he who has endured." The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who "endured." Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one–third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex–slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the "peculiar institution," to describe in their own words what it felt like

With more than 2,300 first-person accounts and 500 black-and-white photographs, I found this to be a fascination glimpse into out country’s history. This is a great place to spend some time.

To see the Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 Web site, go to http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/

My thanks to Cassandra Davis for letting me know about this new resource.