Imagine someone taking away your small child and selling them into slavery, never to be seen again. Imagine losing your spouse this way, your parent, your sibling. When Judith Giesberg, a Civil War historian and a professor at Villanova University, began gathering ads by formerly enslaved people searching for family members, she first created an archive of these ads, called the Last Seen Project. The archive turned into a book, Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families (Simon & Schuster, 2025).
“This book derives from an archiving project that I had been working on for a number of years identifying and publishing information wanted ads taken out by people who were separated in slavery and were searching for their family members,” Giesberg says. “The question I always got as I was talking about the archive was also one that I could never answer, which is—did people find each other?”
Giesberg decided to choose 10 stories from the archive and dig deeper into them to find the answers to that inevitable question. The result was her book, in which she tells those stories. One of those stories is about a former slave found in Battle Creek, Michigan.
The stories of slavery, Giesberg says, often lean heavily on white publications, plantation records, and other sources from the slave owners rather than the slaves. Working with these ads placed by slaves, often in Black newspapers and churches, provide a different perspective, arguably more accurate, often with less of a happy ending in reunion.
These ads, Giesberg says, “describe their experience of slavery in their own words. Soon after they become free, they take to the papers with these stories.”
To provide a fuller, more complete history of slavery in America, Giesberg offers educational resources, including lesson plans, audio and video excerpts, classroom ready narratives, and more that go beyond the average history textbook. These are available on the Last Seen Project website.
Giesberg’s book, Last Seen, was named one of NPR’s 2025 Books We Love and a finalist for the 2026 Sommersell Deep South Book Prize and the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. She is the Robert M. Birmingham Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History at Villanova University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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