When the Great Depression hit the United States in 1929, the American economy hit rock bottom. The value of the dollar became nearly worthless and millions of Americans lost their jobs. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced "The New Deal", a series of new programs designed to pick America back up on to its feet and get the economy moving again. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was one of those programs.

The WPA was born in 1935 with an initial appropriation of $4.88 billion dollars from the Emergency Relief Fund. Over the years, the WPA would employ some 8.5 million Americans, and spent a total of $11 billion dollars. the WPA employed out-of-work Americans who were certified by local agencies as meeting certain qualifications.

The WPA also funded some programs in the humanities, including the Federal Arts Project, Federal Writers Project, Federal Theatre Project, National Health Survey, and the Historical Records Survey (HRS). The HRS was responsible for creating the soundex indexes of the federal census which genealogists today have come to rely so heavily on. The HRS also compiled indexes of vital statistics, cemetery interments, school records, military records, maps, newspapers, and the list went on and on. Microfilms of these indexes were later made by other organizations.

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Americans went to work building war machines. Hundreds of defense contractors earned orders, which spurned the growth of yet thousands of more companies. By 1943, it was clear that the WPA had run its course. Roosevelt signed the order terminating the WPA, which ended on June 30, 1943.

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