Ancestry.com launched its new Slave Narratives database just in time to celebrate this year's Black History Month. For those trying to uncover black history and genealogy, the collection itself is something to celebrate.

The database (also includes biographical stories from more than 3,500 former slaves. Those narratives were originally recorded in the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Writer's Project, and reveal important family history clues such as ages, places of residence and family members' and slaveowners' names. The interviews also capture African-American culture and folklore in the interviewees' own words.

You can search the database by the interviewee's name, keyword or state. The keyword search has a "thesaurus filter" option that lets you look for colloquial terms even if you're not sure what they are. For example, a search for "brother" would also return narratives with "brudder" and "brothuh."

You can also browse voting, songs and hymns, ghost stories, folk medicine and other categories. Clicking on a topic produces a list of excerpts with links to the full texts. The topics bring up hundreds or thousands of entries, though, and you can't do a search to narrow the category. So it's best if you have a specific idea of what you want to look for.

Ancestry also offers the Slave Narratives collection on CD-ROM.

You also can read many of the narratives free on the Library of Congress Web site.