Ads placed by ex-slaves seeking missing kin to be read at Villanova
PHILADELPHIA — The plea is poignant in its urgency, a timeis-running-out appeal published in a Baltimore newspaper more than 40 years after emancipation.
Ann Whaley, 101, is looking for relatives sold away from her. Before she dies, she wants to see them.
“I am very anxious to get in direct correspondence with them,” she wrote. “Anything you can do for me, an ex-slave, will be highly appreciated.”
Whaley’s beseeching words — which appeared in the Baltimore Sun on Aug. 26, 1911 — are about to reach a new audience. On Monday, they will be read from a stage at Villanova University as a cast of 75 area residents and students bring former slaves’ published petitions to life in “Last Seen: Voices from Slavery’s Lost Families.”
The performance will be a compilation of classified ads, letters and articles printed in newspapers in the decades following the 1863 signing of the Emancipation Proclamation: mothers searching for their children, husbands for their wives, daughters and sons for their parents, siblings for each other.
“You think of emancipation as this magic wand of freedom,” said director Valerie Joyce, chair of Villanova’s theater and studio art department. “But 50 years after, (families) are still placing ads for the people they lost” in a “search that reveals the open wounds that were left long after slavery ended.”
The production was born of an online database created in 2017 by Judith Giesberg, a history professor and Civil War scholar at Villanova, and Margaret Jerrido, archivist for Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia’s Old City.
Their project, “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” has since become a repository for nearly 4,000 ads from hundreds of newspapers, including African-American publications such as the Black Republican in New Orleans, abolitionist papers such as the Liberator, and the Christian Recorder, the official publication of the A.M.E. denomination published at Mother Bethel. The materials include a trove of names of former slaves and long-lost relatives, owners and traders, and plantation locations.
The database, which continues to grow as more ads are transcribed, has been a boon to the keepers of family histories. The Rev. Dr. Mark Kelly Tyler, of Mother Bethel, found a greatgreat-great-great-grandfather, the Rev. J. W. Devine of Pittsburgh, mentioned in an ad as a contact for former slaves seeking their families.
Last spring, Giesberg and Jerrido traveled to Yale University for a conference on digitizing African-American history, where they met a faculty member who suggested using the ads as the basis for a theatrical project. Back at Villanova, Giesberg and Joyce set it in motion, with the hope that other schools will be inspired to follow suit.
For their production, they put out a call for volunteer readers and wound up with a diverse cast ranging in age from 6 to 78 and including teachers, clergy, students, retirees, professors, and students from a performing arts school in Baltimore.
They had one rehearsal before Monday’s performance.
“I am very anxious to get in direct correspondence with them. Anything you can do for me, an ex-slave, will be highly appreciated.”
an ad placed by Ann Whaley that ran in a Baltimore newspaper on Aug. 26, 1911