Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families by Judith Giesberg published by Simon & Schuster (2025).
Note: This review is currently being worked on. It will be ready by March 15, 2025
Judith Giesberg has released 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 and that many continued to suffer from for the next half-century. .
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 4,700 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. Her new book is based on the ads her team found and posted, as well as detailed background research into those missing and the families that sought them.
Before the 1960s, many American school kids got a sanitized version of slavery, Slave families were respected. Slave owners treated their enslaved people as a form of extended families, and the agricultural South was not as intent on profit making as the industrialized North. Of course, with the reexamination of primary source material, these pleasant illusions gave way to long-suppressed evidence of the torture, rape, and family separation that were routine and unpunished within the American slave system.
According to Giesberg, by the start of the Civil War one million enslaved people “had been sold from the Upper South to the Deep South.” This meant that one-quarter of the Black population were sold and moved from their families to parts unknown. The commercialization of human trafficking in the 1850s made the shipment of human beings from the Upper South, where fields were starting to play out, to the newly opened regions like Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas into a new form of capitalist exchange. It replaced the exchange of slaves through posts of entry which had been outlawed a half-century earlier with a domestic slave trade that could be every be as traumatic. Men could be sold away from their wives in Virginia and then transported on foot in a “slave coffle” to New Orleans where they could be resold again and taken to newly opened cotton fields in Texas. Young daughters could be taken away from their mothers and sold on the “fancy” market which meant they were destined for prostitution before they were became adolescents.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
