Slave Narratives

Perhaps no other resource approaches the range of human experience found in Ancestry's Slave Narratives. This collection of interviews stands in contrast to other slave narratives that appear in most literature anthologies which were written by the rare few who, against staggering odds, had become literate. This database provides a more poignant picture of what it was to live as a slave in the American South. Taken from The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, this collection is the most complete available picture of the African-American slavery experience. There is simply no other historical document quite like it.

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Additional Information
The collection contains over 20,000 pages of type-scripted interviews with more than 3,500 former slaves collected over a ten year period. In 1929, an effort began at Fisk University in Tennessee and Southern University in Louisiana to document the life stories of these former slaves. Kentucky State College continued the work in 1934 and from 1936-1939, the Federal Writer's Project (a federal work project that was a part of The New Deal) launched a coordinated national effort to collect narratives from former slaves. Most of the narratives in this collection come from this federal project. After 1939, these interviews lay in boxes scattered across 26 states. In 1970, George Rawick collected the narratives from all these sources into the 41 volumes that constitute this database.