LAST SEEN

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 her eight 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.