Book Review: Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families

Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families. By Judith Giesberg. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2025. Hardcover, 336 pp., $29.99.

Reviewed by Tim Talbott

Perhaps no better piece of evidence dents the longstanding Lost Cause pillar attempting to claim that slavery was a benign, benevolent, and civilizing institution than the thousands of advertisements published in the decades following the Civil War endeavoring to reunite family and friends separated during slavery. Most often placed in African American newspapers, and requesting church congregations and Black civic audiences to read them out loud to help spread the word, these appeals lay bare the tragic reality of family separations caused by the domestic slave trade or that resulted from enslaved individuals seeking freedom through self-emancipation efforts.

Scholars have previously used these notices on an individual basis to discuss issues during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. However, Judith Giesberg, with her recently published book Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families, is among the first to extensively examine the depth and breadth of the peoples’ experiences who placed the ads and share the lengths they went to try to reunite family members separated by slavery.

Giesberg worked from a group of over 4,500 advertisements that individuals and families from Freedom Generation placed during the six or seven decades following the Civil War. Geisberg defines Freedom Generation as the “men and women who were born enslaved and became free during or just before the U.S. Civil War.” (xiv) Giesberg and her students have collected these ad and they are now available to the public at www.informationwanted.org. They reveal heartbreaking stories of separated siblings, nullified nuptials, and just about every other possible form of broken family bond. But, the ads reveal more than just the information they contain.

After emancipation in 1865, newspapers joined the previously predominant word-of-mouth form of communication—known by the enslaved as the “grapevine telegraph”—to disseminate information. As Giesberg explains, “The [information wanted] advertisements highlight the role newspapers played in supporting Black communities and allow us to see how news and information traveled through and between these communities.” (xix)

Through these ads, one sees the mountain of challenges families faced in their goal to reunite. For some, names changed in the transitions from enslaver to enslaver and from slavery to freedom. Others faced vast distances as the domestic slave trade moved upper-South enslaved people to the southwest Cotton Kingdom states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Limited and imperfect knowledge of their surroundings, along with faded memories of enslavers’ names and places of residence made making connections difficult, especially for those who were young when separated. Deaths and the continual movement of separated loved ones also limited the effectiveness of potential networks.

To try to help bridge these challenges the ads often provided their readers with a chronological trail of information, such as when and where the seeker had “last seen” their family member(s), as well as facts like their enslavers’ names and the places they had lived, all in the hope that someone somewhere might offer a clue that would result in reuniting lost loved ones.

Instead of approaching the information wanted ads thematically, in Last Seen, Giesberg choses to utilize case studies. Doing so allows her to show the uniqueness of the ads and the posters’ individuality. “Each search for family was unique,” the author explains, “shaped as it was by the people who were doing the searching and those whom they sought, the places they lived, and the accuracy of the details both searcher and searchee brought into freedom.” (xxii) The case study method still allows Giesberg plenty of opportunities to share significant connecting themes.

Geisberg organizes Last Seen into ten chapters of mostly individual stories based obviously on ads. Ranging in date of publication from 1866 to 1917 (but not presented in any chronological order), each chapter’s story is a masterpiece of research and analysis, often with an extra side of genealogy. The stories are at once both heartbreaking and inspiring and written with a flair that has readers eagerly looking forward to reading the next.

While we know that some of the information seekers fortunately struck gold and reunited with long-lost loved ones, for the vast majority, the disappointment and pain of slavery continued into freedom as their searches continued unfulfilled.

Last Seen is an important and timely book. It fills a void in the historiography of slavery and Reconstruction that helps students see the true humanity of Freedom Generation, their love of family and the importance of the family circle in their aspirations for their present and future.