Last Seen: Searching for Family After Slavery

FAIN: FZ-287117-22

Judith Ann Giesberg
Villanova University (Villanova, PA 19085-1478)

Research and writing leading to a book on previously enslaved persons’ efforts to locate missing family members. 

Last Seen tells the story of ten ex-slaves as they search for family members taken from them in slavery. Through ads they placed in the papers, the book traces their efforts to find children, parents, brothers, and sisters who were sold into the Domestic Slave Trade. Their stories are compelling, heartbreaking, and unforgettable. Understanding the long, slow, and incomplete process by which ex-slaves reclaimed and rebuilt their families forces us to rethink the narrative of American freedom. Reconstruction marked the beginning of a new chapter in American history in which the nation sought a way forward, without slavery. It has often been portrayed as a moment of reunion, both for the nation and for ex-slaves who are pictured happily embracing one another again and moving on, together, into freedom. Instead it was the beginning of a long process of holding on to hope and managing expectations. How did ex-slaves make freedom even as missing family tugged them back to slavery?

Associated Products

Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find their Lost Family (Book)
Title: Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find their Lost Family
Author: Judith Giesberg
Editor: Robert Bender
Abstract: Last Seen tells the stories of ten people as they look for the family they lost in slavery. It follows the survivors of slavery’s extraordinary violence as they work to repair the connections to their blood relations and kin, rebuild in freedom the family that was taken from them, and to heal from the trauma of loss. Last Seen shows how Black women and men reconstituted families, how they traced the lines of kinship that mattered and determined which ought to be severed. As freed people rebuilt their families, they made clear that they would not be bound by dominant white cultural definitions of what constituted family. This work would not be completed in a generation, and it did not always obey the demands of the narrative we hope to hear. Today, the desire for Black family reunion remains strong; it explains the proliferation of Black genealogy groups and television series that cater to them, drives tourism to the remains of West African slave dungeons, and informs the critique of mass Black incarceration. Last Seen tells the story of one generation’s work to reimagine and rebuild family, against considerable odds, and speaks to the desire for reunion felt by African Americans today.
Year: 2025
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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