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James Campbell lived a long life, well into his eighties. About a year before his death in the late 1930s, he had no trouble pinpointing the happiest time of his life. It was more than 70 years earlier, when he was a young teenager.

He recalled that happy day when a Yankee soldier came and told him the war was over and he was free. One moment Campbell was a slave on a Virginia plantation; the next moment — that moment of emancipation — brought an unbridled sense of joy that remained with him his entire life.

How and why was Campbell's story preserved? We can thank Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

During the Great Depression, the government put unemployed Americans to work doing all kinds of projects. One of the major efforts was the Works Progress Administration also known as the WPA.

Restraint in creating multiple layers of bureaucracy has rarely hampered the federal government, and the WPA was no exception. There were a number of project subsets under the WPA umbrella; one of them was the Federal Arts Projects, and under the FAP was the Federal Writers Project.

The FWP created jobs for unemployed white-collar workers who presumably had some prior literary skills. As one component of their efforts, FWP workers conducted interviews with the American populace, gathering tales and folklore from ordinary folk.

FWP workers in Florida began to focus on interviewing former slaves; eventually WPA head-honchos in Washington got wind of the slave interviews. They liked the concept and decided to create a specific program to collect narratives or oral histories from former slaves.

That's what sent Hallie Miller, an Ohio FWP worker, to James Campbell's door. In his conversation with Miller, Campbell described his life as a slave; he also mentioned his parents and his siblings.

Additionally, he named his owner and the owner's children, making comments about their personalities.

Campbell's story and a photograph taken of him can be found on the Internet at the Library of Congress Web site. Digital images of typed interviews with more than 2,300 former slaves, as well as 500 photographs, are online at: memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html

In addition to the fascinating historical nature of these slave narratives, they can be a valuable resource for tracing African-American ancestors and for tracing slave-owners.

Many of the interviewees mentioned names, dates, and places for both their own families and for the families of their masters.

Like most family history resources, researchers need to approach the narratives with some caution. The interviews were conducted more than 70 years after the slaves had been freed. Naturally, all of the interviewees were elderly, some more than 100 years old. Memories had faded.

Also, the vast majority of the interviewers were white and some of the former slaves may have tempered their comments, saying what they thought the interviewer wanted to hear.

The narratives also went through several editing stages, by the initial interviewer and by others up the ladder in the FWP. In some cases, the original notes taken at the interview contain much more, and occasionally much different, information than what made it into the final version.

Many other slave narratives exist besides the 2,300 on the Library of Congress Web site. For a good overview of where to find additional FWP slave narratives, as well as narratives collected as parts of other projects, see the book African American Genealogical Sourcebook, edited by Paula K. Byers.