Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People To Find Their Lost Families

The Second Middle Passage, the transportation of enslaved people from one U.S. state to another, forcibly separated families, relocating siblings, parents, children, and spouses across multiple states. The arduous task of locating loved ones who had often not been seen for decades began after the defeat of the Confederacy. Ads placed in newspapers throughout the North and South urgently sought information about long-lost family members. Giesberg (history, Villanova Univ.; Sex and the Civil War) expertly utilizes an archive of thousands of such information-seeking ads published from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s. Many of the stories demonstrate how difficult it could be to locate family members, as searchers tried to remember names, dates, and places. In other instances, people discovered that in the intervening years, their spouses had remarried. While a few stories have endings where family members were reunited, the vast majority show how the horrors of enslavement and forced migration continued to affect Black families for years after emancipation.