18thVirginia
Major
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2012
Louis Hughes was one of many slaves who were separated from their families in Virginia and transported west to Mississippi. He survived slavery and became a husband, a father and a successful businessman in a new life in Milwaukee. Late in life, he would publish a memoir of his time as a slave, Thirty Years A Slave, From Bondage to Freedom, 1897. He would describe how he came to be reunited with his brother, Billy, when a salesman told him that there was a hotel cook in Cleveland who looked just like him. Louis traveled to Cleveland and found this long lost brother.
Billy Hughes had been back to Virginia, trying to find his mother and other Hughes brothers, but could uncover no traces of them. Reading the slave narratives, the individuals often mention a search for relatives lost through slavery and sometimes how they chanced to find their families again.
Some newly freed people started running ads in papers around the country in the final years of the Civil War, seeking to find their long lost relatives. A project between Villanova University's graduate history program and Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia has been digitizing these ads, with some 900 already completed.
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswi...lavery-searching-for-loved-ones-in-wanted-ads
Billy Hughes had been back to Virginia, trying to find his mother and other Hughes brothers, but could uncover no traces of them. Reading the slave narratives, the individuals often mention a search for relatives lost through slavery and sometimes how they chanced to find their families again.
Some newly freed people started running ads in papers around the country in the final years of the Civil War, seeking to find their long lost relatives. A project between Villanova University's graduate history program and Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia has been digitizing these ads, with some 900 already completed.
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswi...lavery-searching-for-loved-ones-in-wanted-ads