Similar to other states, a significant portion of Connecticut’s population came from somewhere else. The variety of available employment attracted immigrants from all over the world who came, worked, stayed and contributed their peice to the state’s rich ethnic mosaic. The resulting mix of traditions, cultures and languages has been documented in several oral history projects beginning with the WPA Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, continued in the mid 1970s by the Peoples of Connecticut project at UConn and, more recently, the Waterbury Area Immigrant Oral History Collection. The transcripts for the Waterbury collection are available online and can be accessed via the finding aid for the collection at http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/findaids/watbimmig/MSS20090014.html.
Related Connecticut WPA era oral histories can be found electronically on the Library of Congress’ American Memory website at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/ctcat.html. Transcripts of the Peoples of Connecticut and WPA oral histories are available in the Reading Room of the Dodd Research Center.