WPA Narratives

Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewed more than 2,300 formerly enslaved individuals across the United States. These first-person accounts—raw, emotional, and powerful—form one of the most important archival records of slavery in American history.

Another 1,000 interviews, just as valuable, were never added to the official WPA collection and are preserved at the state level.

10 Million Names researchers are launching a three-year project to make these accounts searchable, discoverable, and connected to living descendants.

Using our proprietary family tree-building software, AncesTREES, our team will:

• Build detailed family trees for each interviewee
• Extract and verify the names of enslaved individuals and their descendants
• Create a fully searchable digital collection for use by families, scholars, and the public

This effort will cover the 15 states where most interviews were conducted—Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia—plus the District of Columbia, Indiana, and Ohio.
 

These interviews are among the few historical documents where formerly enslaved people speak for themselves. But while their words were recorded, their names—and the names of their families—have not been fully indexed, verified, or connected to present-day genealogies.

This project gives us a unique opportunity to:

• Recover 3,300 enslaved names
• Identify over 2,000,000 descendants
• Reconnect Black families with their ancestral pasts
• Honor the testimony of those who, against all odds, survived slavery and bore witness
   

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