Sub-title: The enduring search by formerly enslaved people to find their lost families
As the sub-title indicates, this is the stories of people looking for family after the Civil War. Through newspaper ads by formerly enslaved people, the author weaves their desperate attempts to find family sold off callously and indiscriminately by slave owners. The anguish is palatable of having your children, spouse, siblings taken away as slave owners attempted to retain their "property", moving south and then east as the Union Army advanced.
My eyes were opened to the estimated one million former slaves who escaped to join the Union army as refugees, migrating to the big cities I'd never thought of the huge numbers displaced and desperately seeking to find their relatives. The chaos of a war on our own soil was stark - the destruction and cruelty and disregard for other humans beings, two sides with totally different beliefs, one side overpowering the other.
The author founded a website where the advertisements and newspapers that were searched and documented for these stories and the history of the times called "information wanted" (https://informationwanted.org/ ). It's a resource for researching enslaved people in the 1860s.
This was a tough book to read but well worth the learning.
Published: 2025 Read: January 2026 Genre: History
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