Last Seen
The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People for their Lost Family
Last Seen was named one of NPR’s 2025 Books We Love and finalist for the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize!
Last Seen follows ten freed people on epic searches for the loved ones they lost in the slave trade. Drawing on a unique archive of Information Wanted and Lost Friends advertisements published in African American newspapers after the Civil War, each chapter is a microhistory that allows readers to feel what it was like to endure separation from family and kin, to be sustained for decades by an enduring love. Each individual’s story helps to highlight the book’s broader themes–violence, escape, standing up, naming names, legacy, and reunion. Each one shows how freedom unfolded over many years as individuals tried to find one another and to lay claim to those they could not.
Praise and reviews
“Last Seen illustrates what it means to search for someone or, in many instances, the loss of not knowing that you were being sought. Giesberg is delicately working through what can only be labeled grief. And she is writing to recount and restore the dignity, love and determination of restless souls. This history deserves to be read widely, taught carefully and preserved indefinitely.”
– KELLIE CARTER JACKSON
Author of We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance
“At the center of Last Seen are accounts of those who lived their lives in the present yet would not relinquish those taken from them long ago. In reaching out through networks of Black newspapers and churches to tell their stories and ask for assistance, they left evidence, in Giesberg’s words, “of pasts and futures that might have been.”
– JOSHUA D. ROTHMAN
Author of The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America
Last Seen named on PBS Newshour, Literary Critics reveal their favorite books of 2025 (minute 3:51), December 9, 2025.
Last Seen named on of Maureen Corrigan’s 10 favorite books of 2025, December 8, 2025.
Last Seen named one of NPR’s Books We Love, November 24, 2025.
Kirkus Reviews, November 9, 2025.
Kellie Carter Jackson, Washington Post, April 16, 2025.
Julia M. Klein, The Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2025.
Terri Schlichenmeyer, Philadelphia Tribune, April 8, 2025.
Barbara Spindel, Christian Science Monitor, March 12, 2025.
Patrick Young, The Reconstruction Era, March 11, 2025.
Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air, February 26, 2025.
Joshua Rothman, New Republic, February 26, 2025.
Paula Tarnapol Whitacre, Washington Independent Review of Books, February 24, 2025.
Glenn Altschuler, Florida Courier, Febuary 22, 2025.
Valerie Russ, “At Mother Bethel, Villanova professor previews ‘Last Seen,’,”Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 2025.
All books by Judy
