Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families by Judith Giesberg published by Simon & Schuster (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 ports 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 sex-work before they became adolescents. Not only was the individual not respected in mid-19th Century America, the rights of the Black family and Black communities were ignored in this highly profitable selling of human beings. Giesberg writes:
“Each of them left behind family. One-quarter of those sold were between the ages of eight and fifteen; these children were often sold without a parent or a sibling.4 When a child traveled that far from home, to a place where everyone was a stranger and nothing was familiar, they must have felt lost. Many never saw their family again.”
As slavery began to collapse even before the Emancipation Proclamation as enslaved people fled to Union lines, these refugees looked to their own preservation and to moving Emancipation forward by their own participation in the Union war effort, but they also looked at finding their lost family members and trying to rebuild the families that had been torn asunder by the American market in human beings.
While reuniting families may seem like a very difficult task, it was made even more difficult by the circumstances of the forced diaspora of the Blacks. Your sister or child may not be in your county or even your state. Virginia-born slaves may have been sold to “owners” in Arkansas or Mississippi. If relatives escaped from slavery, they might live in New York or Boston. Even further were escaped enslaved people who had been forced to find refuge in Canada by the Fugitive Slave Act. Giesberg does a fine job of showing how now-freed individuals developed strategies to hunt their missing intimates.
The Lincoln and Johnson administrations did not recognize the need for the emancipated to find their relatives. There was no reclamation service to help. Instead, the freed slaves had to rely on the kindness of Freedman’s Bureau officials, Union soldiers, clergy, and newspaper publishers to get the word out about their search.
Giesberg says that many searchers placed ads in the Philadelphia’s Christian Recorder and New Orleans’s Southwestern Christian Advocate, These papers served Black church audiences. Since many formers slaves, really most, did not know how to read, when a church saw the ads they would often read them out loud to their congregations. While the two papers seem to have a local audience, Giesberg says that they were mailed to subscribers in many parts of the country. Giesberg used these ads, more than 4,700 of them, to post on her website and to use as a database to study the almost endless searching.
In her book, Professor Giesberg details several stories of families who placed these “Last Seen” advertisements. Some indicate that a mother or brother placed ads over decades in the increasing forlorn hope of being reunited. In the 20th Century the advertisers were looking for beloved relatives, but they also had a purpose as they increased in age and saw their earning power diminished of getting some support from a child or a younger sibling. Even though many of America’s Blacks had worked for years under slavery, the former slave owners felt no need to provide support. the State and Federal governments did not even provide support for white elderly before Franklin Roosevelt.
The only thing that I have doubts about is Giesberg’s estimate of the number of people searching for family members through ads only having a 2% chance of being reunited. She says that this is based on incomplete information based of what was published in the papers about the results of the search. I have helped many refugees trying to search for 21st Century family members separated by war and persecution. After a few efforts, I typically never saw them again. Does that mean that they never found the objects of their inquiries? No. I would often run into the same refugee years later and they would tell me that the relative was found many moths later. Searchers are satified when their object is found. They often don’t think of notifying others of their good fortune.
This is a very good and popularly written account of family reunification, and separation after the Civil War. It is also very important for experts to look at a multi-generation study of the impact of slavery on three generations of African Americans. I highly recommend it.
Note: If you want to examine the Last Seen database it is available here.
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