Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery

Join the Friends and historian Judith Giesberg to explore a new digital resource for researching African American ancestors.

Last Seen: Finding Family after Slavery offers researchers a tool for telling family stories of separation and survival during enslavement, emancipation, and the Civil War. It offers easy access to digitized "Information Wanted" advertisements placed in newspapers by former slaves and United States Colored Troops searching for family members lost by sale, flight, or enlistment. 

The ads mention family members, often by name, but also by physical description, circumstances of separation, last seen locations, and at times by the name of a former slave master. The earliest ads appeared in papers in 1863, and they continued for more than thirty years. Last Seen: Finding Family after Slavery allows users to search these ads by proper names, locations, circumstances of separation, military regiments, and events. 

Dr. Giesberg will demo and discuss the Last Seen project in a conversation moderated by Patricia Williams Lessane, Executive Director of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. 

This program is proudly co-sponsored by the College of Charleston Friends of the Library and the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. 

Speaker's Bio: Judith Giesberg is a professor and director of graduate studies in the department of history at Villanova University. She is the author of four books on the Civil War era: Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition (2000); "Army at Home": Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009); Keystone State in Crisis: Pennsylvania in the Civil War (2013); and Emilie Davis's Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863–1865 (2014). She also serves as editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era.