The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families
Starred review from January 1, 2025
The Second Middle Passage, the transportation of enslaved people from one U.S. state to another, forcibly separated families, relocating siblings, parents, children, and spouses across multiple states. The arduous task of locating loved ones who had often not been seen for decades began after the defeat of the Confederacy. Ads placed in newspapers throughout the North and South urgently sought information about long-lost family members. Giesberg (history, Villanova Univ.; Sex and the Civil War) expertly utilizes an archive of thousands of such information-seeking ads published from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. Many of the stories demonstrate how difficult it could be to locate family members, as searchers tried to remember names, dates, and places. In other instances, people discovered that in the intervening years, their spouses had remarried. While a few stories have endings where family members were reunited, the vast majority show how the horrors of enslavement and forced migration continued to affect Black families for years after emancipation. VERDICT Based on a unique set of sources, this heart-wrenching work should be read by all focused on enslavement studies as well as American and Civil War history.--Chad E. Statler
Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
December 15, 2024
Tough-minded appraisal of a particularly fraught aspect of post-Civil War history. Newspaper ads seeking information about missing family members, some published as late as 1916, attest to the determination of emancipated African Americans to find children, spouses, and siblings from whom they were separated. (Villanova University historian Giesberg has assembled an online archive of some 4,500 of these ads, the Last Seen Project, to assist people looking for their ancestors.) But feel-good reports of miraculous reunions and tear-jerking accounts of mothers' quests for long-lost children are confined in this unflinching book to contemporary stories in white newspapers, which in Giesberg's assessment were part of white America's ongoing efforts to minimize the lasting damage inflicted by the institution of slavery. She contrasts these newspapers' reports of one woman's "pitiful quest for her daughter" or the "affecting meeting of two sisters"--short on particulars about their Black subjects and long on reassuring mentions of the Underground Railroad (stressing white abolitionists' participation)--with the listings African Americans provided, which offered as many facts as they could about relatives often sold far away and perhaps with names changed by new owners. The precarious existence many Black people led after emancipation can be judged by the woman advertising in 1866 for news of hereight children sold, because "she is growing old and needs help." Giesberg uses 10 individual cases as springboards for examinations of broad topics: the ugly realities of slavery, brutal working and living conditions, and the callous separation of families; the brief euphoria of the Reconstruction years, when political and civil rights seemed within grasp for African Americans; and the grim aftermath in which nascent rights were abrogated, often violently. Black institution building and communal support are also spotlighted, but this unvarnished account reminds us that centuries of suffering have yet to be fully acknowledged or atoned for. Informative and sobering.
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