African American Related Links

Medgar Evers

The Dred Scott Case

American Slave Narratives
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.

This web site provides an opportunity to read a sample of these narratives, and to see some of the photographs taken at the time of the interviews. The entire collection of narratives can be found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79).

American Slave Narratives
North American Slave Narratives

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938

American Colonization Society
Records and photographs of the American Colonization Society

Slave Archival Collection

African Ancestry
African Ancestry is an established genetic genealogy company, headquartered in Washington, DC. Started in 2002, co-founders, Gina Paige and Dr. Rick Kittles, have created a vehicle to enable people of African descent to trace their ancestry back to their present-day African country of origin by analyzing their DNA.

Christine Charity's Website
Researching African-American ancestors

Freedmen's Bureau Records
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands

Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States

Registers of Marriages of Freedmen

Freedman's Bank Records

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

NARA's African American Research page
The National Archives offers insight into the lives of people, their families and our history. Because the records at the National Archives come from every branch of the Federal government, almost all Americans can find themselves, their ancestors, or their community in the archives. Knowing how a person interacted with the government is key to a successful search.

African American Resources

Raquel Thiebes' Slave and Plantation Research has some great hints to get started with your research.

MSGenWeb has an African American Resources page.