Last Seen: The Enduring Search by the Formerly Enslaved People for their Lost Families

Name: Last Seen: The Enduring Search by the Formerly Enslaved People for their Lost Families
Start: 2025-08-16T14:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-08-16T15:30:00-04:00
Location: Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office

Schedule

Sat Aug 16 2025 at 02:00 pm to 03:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office | Washington, DC

Join us for this special presentation at the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum in Washington, D.C. Professor Judith Giesberg will talk about her new book "Last Seen: The Enduring Search by the Formerly Enslaved People for their Lost Families." A Q&A and book signing will follow.
Giesberg’s book follows the stories of ten freed people searching for the loved ones they were sold away from as part of the domestic slave trade. There was no missing persons department dedicated to this work, such as the one Clara Barton spearheaded. There were no congressional funding allocations nor any help from powerful politicians. Members of Freedom Generation relied on Black institutions to help them find their families. How did freed people search for mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and kin that had been scattered to the four corners of the country by slave traders? Where did they begin? And, did they find each other?
The presentation is included with admission to the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum and FREE for NMCWM members.