On Thursday I had the opportunity to see historian Judith Giesberg being interviewed by Columbia University historian Stephanie McCurry, the author of Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South at the Center for Brooklyn History. The historic hall I was sitting in was built during the Civil War in 1863, just two blocks from Brooklyn Boro Hall where, in 1863, Black troops were being recruited for the United States Colored Troops. Professor McCurry was interviewing Giesberg about her new book Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families, a groundbreaking work. The book is based on modern 21st Century technology to look into the trauma that Black families suffered 160 years ago.
Giesberg attracted a lot of attention when she launched her online database in 2017 of ads placed by former slaves looking for their relatives. The ads that she and her students found include more than 4,000 examples. It has become a great resource for historians and, also, Black genealogists. She used modern databases, self-taught genealogists trained on Ancestry.Com, and the internet to uncover late-19th Century torment and hope.
Stephanie McCurry introduced the topic of Blacks trying to reunite families both during the Civil War and after it. She said that four million enslaved Blacks were emancipated. “It took a war, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment to accomplish that. But, no decree is self-enforcing, and so slavery was hard to dismantle. It had been a foundational institution of American life for more than two hundred years, and it was upheld by an absolutely massive edifice of law and custom,” Professor McCurry said. “It took a great deal to dismantle all of its parts,” she concluded.
McCurry said that modern Americans are still unaware of how long the dismantling ran after the Civil War. “Black people had to claim their freedom to make it real,” she said. The “way they started was with the part that mattered most to them-their families.” Enslavers had done violence to Black families over generations.
Judy Giesberg calls the generation alive during the Civil War The Freedom Generation. Giesberg, a professor at Villanova University, says that the title of her book, “Last Seen” comes from the advertisements placed by former slaves trying to find family members. “Last Seen” would describe where the searcher would say where the missing family member was seen before she or he was sold. That time was very moving and tragic for the enslaved family as they would likely never see the sold-off family member again. In the ads, the searcher would describe how the family member looked when she or he was sold, as well as the date of the sale and who brought the enslaved person.
McCurry then asked Giesberg to describe the evolution of the online achive. Giesberg started it as a collaboration between herself and an archivist, Margaret Jerrido, at Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia. The AME church used to publish ads in its newspaper of people looking for family members lost to slavery. About a decade before the online database went live, Professor Giesberg was already discussing with the archivist ways they might uncover these ads from the 19th Century.
Giesberg came across these ads when she was going through old newspapers held by Villanova’s library. She worked with the archivist from the AME church to create a free database that would be readily accessible to modern descendants of these formerly enslaved people researching their ancestors. She thought they would find several hundred of these ads but as she spoke to Black genealogical groups she found that there were a lot of newspapers that had published these ads. There are now 4,700 ads posted on this open access database from more than 200 different newspapers from throughout the country. The funding came from grants from the National Archives. Giesberg said that the web site has been designed to accommodate genealogists who were the first adapters in using the web site.
You can you use the Last Seen archive site here.
Giesberg says that only a small minority of those looking for people were successful. Many of the people looking for family members had not seen the missing family members for years or even decades. White people broke up families of nonwhite people fairly frequently, whether it was enslaved people, Native Americans, or Latinos, and once a sale was recorded there is very little documentary information about what happened to the victim.
According to Giesberg, there were slaves searching for family members during the Civil War, immediately afterward, during Reconstruction and into Jim Crow. In fact, some were still searching for family members in the 1920s, sixty years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It was particularly hard to look for female family members. Most women would change their last name when they married and so, someone from the Jones family would then be known as Smith to her neighbors in the late 19th Century. The sadness and disappointment of the former slaves trying to put their families back together comes through in the research Giesberg has done.
I won’t go into the content of the book itself. I had just finished reading the book an hour before the interview and I will post a review soon. I would say that the Center for Brooklyn History offered a brief overview exhibit on slavery in Brooklyn called Traces. At the time of the Revolution, Brooklyn had about the same proportion of slaves as Piedmont Virginia. Here are some photos in this small exhibit.
All photos taken by Patrick Young.
Note: The feature photo shows Judith Giesberg on left being interviewed by Columbia University historian Stephanie McCurry on right. Above them were projected ads searching for lost loved ones.
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