At Mother Bethel, Villanova professor previews ‘Last Seen,’ her book about how Black families searched for relatives sold during slavery

One year after the Civil War ended, Hagar Outlaw, a formerly enslaved woman in North Carolina, was desperate to find eight of her children who had been sold during slavery. She turned to Philadelphia’s Christian Recorder and placed an “Information Wanted” ad.

Published on April 7, 1866, the newspaper ad listed her children by their names: Cherry, Viny, Mills, Noah, John, Eli, Thomas, and Julia. All were last seen in Wake Forest.

“I hope they will think enough of their mother to come and look for her, as she is growing old and needs help,” the ad stated.

Living in Raleigh, Outlaw implored her children to “come to the capital of North Carolina and you will find your mother there, eagerly awaiting her loved ones.”

The story of Hagar Outlaw is one of 10 family narratives told in a new book, Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families, by Judith Giesberg, a Villanova University history professor.

Last Seen is based on the digitized Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery archive of nearly 5,000 newspaper ads, letters, and articles published in hundreds of newspapers around the country. Requests for information on loved ones were submitted by people in every existing state and territory, and from Great Britain, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Haiti.

Giesberg and Villanova researchers worked with Margaret Jerrido, the archivist at Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, to launch the digital archive in 2017.

Giesberg said her book, released on Feb. 4, is an attempt to answer “the question” so many people asked her when she gave talks about the archive project: Were people able to find their relatives?

The book focuses on the lives of 10 people who placed ads and tells how they earned a living, survived the Civil War, and began building new families as they longed for those they had lost.

Mothers and fathers searched for children; children searched for parents; siblings looked for one another; and husbands and wives sought to reunite.

When the Last Seen website launched, researchers had uploaded 1,000 ads from six newspapers dating from 1863 to 1902.

Today, the free archive at informationwanted.org has transcribed 4,719 ads from more than 300 newspapers. The earliest was published in 1832 in William Lloyd Garrison’s the Liberator, the latest in the Richmond Planet in 1922.

“The institution of slavery was sustained on a callous assault on enslaved people’s families,” Giesberg wrote in the book.

That people who were separated struggled to find family members into the early 20th century — almost 60 years after the Civil War ended — showed the deep bonds Black people had with one another.

The ads also contradict the stories enslavers told after emancipation, that they had not sold children away from their mothers, or that Black people didn’t have the same family connection as white people.

Now, in the 21st century, Black American genealogists use the Last Seen archives to fill in their family trees.

“There’s a through line in the way Americans have thought about some families being sacrosanct,” Giesberg said in an interview. “The way that people in the United States believe this kind of trauma that affects white people ... that enslaved people didn’t feel that loss the way that white families do. That’s implicit in the way the U.S. government is talking about migrants now.”

In 2019, Giesberg worked with Villanova’s drama department and members of several Philadelphia-area A.M.E. churches to present a dramatic production: Last Seen: Voices From Slavery’s Lost Families.

Some ads were not seeking family members. Soldiers sought fellow soldiers to vouch for their service in the United States Colored Troops in the U.S. Army during the Civil War so they or their widows could get pensions. One such veteran, Henry Saffold, placed two ads in 1888.

Last Seen isn’t the first book exploring how Black people used information wanted ads to find family members. In 2012, Heather Andrea Williams, a lawyer and professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote Help Me to Find My People.

In the introduction of her book, Giesberg said she was moved by Williams’ “description of descendants who ‘are haunted by the need to know, the desire to find out about those who were lost through sale or through the negligence of history.’”

The ads, letters, and articles were published in both Black- and white-owned newspapers. Two popular Black-owned papers were the Christian Recorder, the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and New Orleans’ Southwestern Christian Advocate, published by the Methodist Episcopal Church.

Among the white-owned newspapers that carried the ads or published articles were the New York World, the St. Louis Dispatch, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Jerrido, Mother Bethel’s archivist, said, “This was so important to African Americans. They had no other means of talking to each other than through the newspapers.”

Giesberg could not find out why Outlaw, who was about 60 in 1866, did not include the name of her ninth child, Dolly. Perhaps she already knew where Dolly was, Giesberg wrote.

Outlaw’s ad was remarkable because of its details. She listed the names of the slaveholders or traders who bought or sold her children: “Cherry, Viny, and Mills Outlaw were bought by Abram Hester. Noah Outlaw was taken to Alabama by Joseph Turner Hillsborough … Thomas Rembry Outlaw was taken by Wm. Outlaw. Julia Outlaw was sold in New Orleans by Dr. Outlaw.”

Giesberg found there was a prominent family of white Outlaws who sold the enslaved Black Outlaws. Dr. Outlaw was a reference to a white lawyer, David Outlaw, a former U.S. congressman.

Hagar Outlaw was reunited with at least three of her children. Two of her daughters, Dolly and Julia, and Julia’s 9-year-old son came first. Eli later joined the family.

Another Black mother, Clara Bashop, was still looking for two children in 1892, well after the Civil War had ended. Her daughter, Patience Green, was sold when she was 12. Her son, John William Harris, was 14 when he went to work with servants in Maryland “after the surrender.”

Bashop walked into the offices of the New York World, perhaps to place an ad. A clerk led her to a reporter who published a story about her search on Oct. 2, 1892.

In Black newspapers, Bashop had placed ads looking for her two children. But when the World and other white publications told these stories, they focused only on the “lost little girl.”

“Slavery was scrubbed of meaning,” Giesberg wrote.

Because many people emerging from enslavement could not read or write, they turned to trusted sources: pastors, younger relatives, and, sometimes, agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau to write the ads for them and send them to newspapers around the country.

It was common, also, for ministers to read the ads aloud after a church service. Many in the congregation could not read, and others could not afford newspaper subscriptions.

In addition to the columns in the Recorder, headlined “Information Wanted,” other newspapers carried ads under banners such as: “Lost Friends,” “Seeking for the Lost,” and “Do You Know Them?”

On Jan. 26, Giesberg and Jerrido discussed the book at Mother Bethel in Queen Village. The church’s pastor, the Rev. Carolyn C. Cavaness, moderated.

Just as ministers read the ads in churches 160 years ago, on that Sunday, Cavaness read aloud the ad that Henry Tibbs placed in 1879, when he was 55 years old.

He had been sold away from his mother in Alexandria, Va., “when I was quite young” and sent to an enslaver in Mississippi. The ad describes how his mother tried to comfort him.

“[Bruin] put me in jail and I cried, so he told me if I would hush, he would bring my mother there next morning … Mother brought me some cake and candy, and that was the last time I saw her,” Cavaness read from the book.

Giesberg said she was particularly drawn by how traumatic it was for children to be sold away from their parents during America’s domestic slave trade. She called the separation a “traffic in children.”

It was important, she added, to talk about the book at Mother Bethel, because that’s where her research into the ads began years ago, when she noticed them in the Recorder while doing other research about the Civil War.