
Help Me to Find My People
The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery
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Narrated by:
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Robin Miles
After the Civil War, African Americans placed poignant “information wanted” advertisements in newspapers, searching for missing family members. Inspired by the power of these ads, Heather Andrea Williams uses slave narratives, letters, interviews, public records, and diaries to guide listeners back to devastating moments of family separation during slavery when people were sold away from parents, siblings, spouses, and children. Williams explores these heartbreaking stories and the long, usually unsuccessful journeys toward reunification. Examining the interior lives of the enslaved and freed people as they tried to come to terms with great loss, Williams grounds their grief, fear, anger, longing, frustration, and hope in the history of American slavery and the domestic slave trade.
Williams follows those who were separated, chronicles their searches, and documents the rare experience of reunion. She also explores the empathy, sympathy, indifference, and hostility expressed by whites about sundered black families. Williams shows how searches for family members in the post - Civil War era continue to reverberate in African American culture in the ongoing search for family history and connection across generations.
About the author: Heather Andrea Williams is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.
©2012 the University of North Carolina Press (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
Beautiful
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Very educational and informative
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WOW!
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THE FLAG CAME DOWN!!!!7-11-2015<br />
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I enjoyed this title because I am the self appointed gemologist for my family and I am eternally grateful for all of the discoveries I have made since 2021. This book speaks of our need to find out who we are and whose we are and it is so profound and necessary.
Ancestry is Everything
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This books is beautifully written and beautifully read - put it high on your list.
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Heartbreaking Truth!
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Wow! WOW!
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For me, it is just impossible to imagine what it must have been like to be separated from loved ones--children, spouses, parents--often for the rest of one's life . . . to be paraded around and sold at an auction like lowly cattle . . . to be no more than property.
But yes, we all know this, right? But how much do we really know? And how much do we want to know? And maybe it's just too painful to listen to? And it was a long time ago and we just need to let it go, right? Things are so much better today, why dredge up the past?
No.
Get this audiobook and listen to it!
Vulnerability and Grief
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Phenomenal
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