A book on the efforts of former slaves to find their lost family members after the Civil War will be the subject of an event at Willard Library in Battle Creek Monday.
One chapter highlights the story of Emeline Skipworth, who escaped slavery in Kentucky before the war, and, through the Underground Railroad, was able to make it to Battle Creek.
But when she fled, she left her sister. They would not be reunited until 1885, forty years after she escaped.
This is one of many histories included in "Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families" by Villanova University history professor Judy Giesberg.
Giesberg said it’s important for people to learn about these stories to understand the long-lasting impacts of slavery.
“We have not yet really accepted the reality that these families were torn apart," Giesberg said.
"It wasn't as if at the end of slavery people just picked up and went on with their lives, carried on as if— as if none of that had happened.”
She said many of these reunifications took decades, with some even placing ads in newspapers to find information about their relatives.
"The stories that I tell in the book profile people who continue to look for their loved ones into the 20th century," Giesberg said.
"The archive on which this book is based, which is at informationwanted.org includes more than 5,000 advertisements placed by people who were searching for their families, and we have advertisements in there placed by people in the 1920s."
Giesberg added that these ads did more than just help reunify families. They also pushed back against the “lost cause” ideology of the post-Civil-War 19th century that attempted to conceal the history and impacts of slavery.
“The attempt was to forget all that and cover it up. And these advertisements worked against that. They refused the cover-up and they challenged that cover-up.”
Giesberg said discussing this history is especially important today, as some state and federal officials try to again censure or erase this history from school curriculums and at national parks.
“We're at a moment in our nation's history when these kinds of histories such as, difficult histories like history of slavery and slavery's aftermath, are suddenly being erased and we're reversing decades of scholarship on this.”
Giesberg will read part of the chapter on Skipworth at the Willard Library at 6pm on Monday.
Michael Symonds reports for WMUK through the Report for America national service program.
