There was this thread discussing significant changes to airline ticketing policies occuring around that time:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...le-policy.html
See also:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...es-aa-com.html
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...e-tickets.html

Was your original ticket refundable or nonrefundable? If nonrefundable I'm not sure the pre-2002 rules were that ticket value always remained but that a person had a year to apply the value to another flight. These 2002 changes by the airlines basically said that nonrefundable tickets had no value after the travel date listed on the ticket.

See also:
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/200...rican-airlines

This old yahoo answers page appears to quote the old rules that used to be on the AA refunds site:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...0065727AAaWtu4