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From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North America, allowing us to explore some of the most compelling themes of nineteenth-century slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family life, relations with masters, and religious belief.

The Digital Library on American Slavery is a cooperative venture between the Race and Slavery Petitions Project and the Electronic Resources and Information Technology Department of University Libraries at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The Digital Library offers a searchable database of detailed personal information about slaves, slaveholders, and free people of color. Designed as a tool for scholars, historians, teachers, students, genealogists, and interested citizens, the site provides access to information gathered and analyzed over an eighteen-year period from petitions to southern legislatures and country courts filed between 1775 and 1867 in the fifteen slaveholding states in the United States and the District of Columbia. Reviewed in the Dec/Jan 2010 issue of Internet Genealogy by Diane L. Richard

The Digital Library on American Slavery offers data on race and slavery extracted from eighteenth and nineteenth-century documents and processed over a period of eighteen years. The Digital Library contains detailed information on about 150,000 individuals, including slaves, free people of color, and whites. These data have been painstakingly extracted from 2,975 legislative petitions and 14,512 county court petitions, and from a wide range of related documents, including wills, inventories, deeds, bills of sale, depositions, court proceedings, amended petitions, among others. Buried in these documents are the names and other data on roughly 80,000 individual slaves, 8,000 free people of color, and 62,000 whites, both slave owners and non-slave owners

The following is a list of slave letters in the Special Collections Library at Duke University. These letters vary in content and most have no supporting information about the author. They do provide a glimpse into the lives of people who fought the odds to express themselves. Additional collections held in Special Collections Library which document slave life are listed in Retrieving African-American Women's History. The descriptions of the letters are linked to catalog records of the larger collections of which they are a part in order to provide a fuller descriptive context.

Downloadable e-book from the Project Gutenberg page on Scribd

This column previously addressed the importance of the 1870 U. S. census in African-American research. As noted in that article, this was the first federal census after the end of the Civil War, and therefore the first record group to record personal information about former slaves nationwide. It was not, however, the earliest record group to do so in many localities. Many similar record groups were created that provide information about former slaves between 1865 and 1870.

When the 1860 federal census was collected and enumerated, slavery was still legal within most of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line. The 1860 federal census enumerated only free people of color in its population schedule; slaves were enumerated namelessly on a separate schedule, identified only by slave owner, age, gender, and color.

Information about British colonial slave registers

From Sankofa's Slave Data Collection

This Jamaica, West Indies, genealogical research site contains transcriptions from various documents for 1655 to 1947 (and a few to 1993), including nineteenth century Jamaica Almanacs (which list property owners and civil and military officials), the complete text of "Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies" written in 1875 by J. H. Lawrence-Archer, Jamaica Directories for 1878, 1891 and 1910, extractions from Jamaican Church records, Civil Registration and Wills, and excerpts from newspapers, books, and other documents. It includes images, a Glossary, Historical Background, and other Utilities to aid in putting this information into focus. New information is added constantly, thus creating a virtual genealogy library for those researching Jamaican families. Here you will come across people from all walks of life: large landowners and paupers, slave and free, knights, gentlemen, laborers, seamen, soldiers, lawmakers and lawbreakers. They all left their imprint in the Jamaican records. Facts come to light, and skeletons jangle in the closet. The colors of people mentioned in the Registers, and the variety of people found here, reflect the island motto, "Out of Many, One People."

Louis Manigault (1828-1899) was a member of a prominent and influential family of rice planters from South Carolina and Georgia. In 1833, his father, Charles Manigault (1795-1874), purchased Gowrie and East Hermitage plantations located on Argyle Island in the Savannah River, several miles upstream from the port of Savannah. Louis managed these properties for his father from the 1850s through the Civil War and Reconstruction.\n\nThe Manigault Plantation Journal, compiled by Louis Manigault between 1856 and 1879, includes information on plantation life, slaves and slavery, rice cultivation, market conditions, accounts, and other topics. Notes and memoranda kept by Charles Manigault regarding the plantations during the 1830s and 1840s were pasted into the journal.

Contains issues of historic papers published in Milledgeville, one-time capital of Georgia, from 1808-1922. A reference for Georgia politics, history, laws, slave data. The Milledgeville Historic Newspaper database is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of Georgia HomePLACE. The project is supported with federal LSTA funds administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Georgia Public Library Service, a unit of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.

From 1935-1943, the WPA built many public buildings and roads. Almost every American community has a park, bridge or facility constructed by the WPA. The program promoted literacy training, health and education improvement projects as well as programs for art and music. This collection provides over 5,000 photographs documenting these activities in Louisiana. The Louisiana Writers Project compiled collections of folklore, legends, recipes, local history and interviewed local citizens and former slaves. Transcriptions of newspapers dating to 1815 provide insights into the culture and history of Louisiana. The WPA Collection was placed in the custody of the State Library when the WPA ended early in 1943. It has since remained, more or less in storage, and in large degree inaccessible. Now available to the public, this digitized material provides a unique look into the history and culture of Louisiana.

The Archival Research Catalog (ARC) is the online catalog of NARA's nationwide holdings in the Washington, DC, area; Regional Archives; and Presidential Libraries. ARC is a work in progress; currently over 63% of our records are described in ARC at the series level. ARC contains many descriptions of records of interest to genealogists and family historians, including: * applications for enrollment in Native American tribes * court records * fugitive slave cases * land records * military personnel records * naturalization records

"Allied POWS Under the Japanese Site for the detailed study of Guam and All Allied POWS used as SLAVES by the Japanese in World War II Check here first: SEARCH HELPS POW Camp List with LINKS to camp details, rosters, and photographs About Us and Copyright Information The purpose of this site is to provide a primary source of documentation for all of the Allied prisoners of the Japanese during WWII. Our goal is to determine what each man's unit was at capture then record what camps he was taken to and where he was rescued. Where possible, we will provide rosters of the hell ships, and, if a man perished, where, when and how."

Wonderful resource! This is related to Indiana narratives.