Kate Carpenter: Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history.

I'm Kate Carpenter, and in most episodes, I'm joined by a historian to talk about their research and writing craft.

In today's show, I spoke with Dr.

Judith Giesberg.

Judith Giesberg: Thank you for having me, Kate.

I'm happy to be here.

Kate Carpenter: Dr.

Giesberg is a historian and professor at Villanova University.

She is the author of six books focused on the US Civil War and its aftermath.

She is also an active digital and public historian, and her newest book is the culmination of these interests.

Inspired by an ongoing digital

project, Last Seen: The Enduring Search for Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families draws on advertisements placed by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, in some cases long, long after, attempting to find loved ones who had been stolen away from them when they were sold by enslavers.

It's a fascinating book, at turns heartbreaking and inspiring, and I was truly delighted to get to ask Judy more about the project and her research process.

Enjoy my conversation with Dr Judy Giesberg.

Judith Giesberg: I kind of found myself surprisingly in the era of sort of Civil War and Reconstruction in graduate school, and the work that I've been that I've worked on since then, has began kind of with elite white women who were working in soldier relief during the Civil War, and then moved to the urban north, where what I really had wanted to do for my dissertation, which is to understand how poor families and immigrants and and people of color survived the war, which is, which was my proposal for dissertation was roundly rejected because it would be too hard and too difficult.

But that's, that's kind of where I've kept myself since then, and and focused on the experiences of people in marginalized communities and how they survived the war and and then with this book, really, it's not really the urban North anymore.

It really follows freed people, wherever they wind up after the war, putting their families back together.

But I include in that and in that question about sort of the trajectory of my career as a writer, work I've done as an editor, which was super helpful to me, not only to sort of clarify what it is we do when we teach graduate students how to write, but also helping me to think through, you know, my writing process when I worked as I worked both as an editor of book reviews and Then the editor journal of the Civil War era for a number of years, and that was a really good process, project for me, you know, thing for me to do, to think through some of what I do, both as a writer and as a mentor for graduate students who are learning to write.

Kate Carpenter: What kinds of things.

Did that experience sort of change or teach you?

Judith Giesberg: Yeah, it, you know, it really well, a number of things, I guess, you know, sort of balancing between, you know, respecting the first style and the voice of authors at the same time as trying to help them find the sort of, you know, the most important thing that they're trying to say and to make that come out clearly, and that can, you know, sometimes when you're working, at least when I was working at editor, I'm sure other editors have other ways to do it.

It felt, to me, in some cases, like, you know, a longer term mentoring kind of relationship where you found an author who has a really great idea, but, you know, there's a lot of back and forth between you and and the author.

But then also, sometimes I invited other people to who were interested in the field and and might sort of help an author, you know, realize what it is that they most wanted to do with a piece.

So it became, it became for me, and a lesson in, sort of the in mentorship, in addition to editing, yeah, and then, you know, the years I spent as a book review editor taught me a lot of stuff.

It taught me, you know, that that that is an art in and of itself.

And it's not necessarily the case that people who are great writers and great scholars necessarily are really great at book reviewing.

You know, it also lent itself to lots of awkward, you know, non looks at conferences where people had right, had had a book review that was overdue and didn't want to engage me, because I was the person that they were most sort of, that they were, you know, that they felt guilty for missing their deadline.

It was, it was, it was a great way for me to feel like I was familiar, you know, to stay on top of everything, all the new books of.

Coming out, and all the things that I you know needed to read and wanted to read.

It also was a lot of matchmaking to think about, sort of, who is the best person to to review a book.

And then it also just teaches you things about people who you thought you really knew, and then you learned something new, like, like a roommate, like, Oh my God, I didn't really know that person was like that, because they'd send me a book review, or I was like, wait a minute, there's a lot of, a lot of stuff going on there.

But it was, it was a pleasure.

I think anybody who's done it, though, would tell you that you can only do that for a few years, and then, right it's time to move on.

You know, rotate that responsibility on to other people, because it's a lot of work.

Yeah, but I enjoyed it while I did it.

Kate Carpenter: Let's talk a little bit about your own writing process.

So when and where do you like to do your writing?

Judith Giesberg: I like to do it right here.

I'm sitting in my office, which is a converted garage in my house, which, during the pandemic, actually made it into a actual room, as opposed to sort of a corner of a cold and unheated garage.

Now it's a, it's got, it's got both heating and air, and it's got some paint on the walls.

And I like working here in my office, in my house.

I'm kind of a late more.

I mean, I fancy myself kind of early morning writer, but to be honest, I I do my sort of best thinking and writing, sort of between the hours of 10 and three with, you know, with breaks in between.

So I like to work right here, and I like to and I do good work between 10 and three.

I think a long time ago, I used to be able to, I think when I have three children, two or in their late 20s, and when they were young, I used to be able the older ones when they were and I have a teenager.

But when the older ones were young, I would do such crazy things as like, put them to bed and then sit down and write for a couple of hours.

But that doesn't really work anymore.

That's not really good.

I could maybe edit something that I've written during the day, but to produce something that, you know, or I can grade papers or write a letter of recommendation, maybe at night, but my writing really has to take place sort of late morning into the afternoon.

Kate Carpenter: Are you a kind of person who sets daily goals for yourself?

Judith Giesberg: I'm not as I'm not.

I mean, I, you know, I have done that.

I don't.

I'm not a word counter so much as, I mean, I guess I set goals for what I'd like to accomplish in a day, you know, if I can sort of, you know, write through this one episode or this one kind of a problem in a day, then I feel like it's a good day.

I don't, I'm not a really, you know, I have done it before, sort of, you know, and I even sort of share that advice that I've heard from other people.

It's a great idea to sort of set yourself a word goal.

And some of the people you've interviewed, I'm so impressed by them because they set these word goals.

And I think that's really, it's really impressive.

I don't do that.

I I really sort of think about it.

And in the cases of, like I said, sort of, what kind of piece of the story would I do I want to tackle today, and if I'm really lucky, maybe I'll get, you know, maybe I'll see the other side of it by the end of the day.

Kate Carpenter: How do you like to organize yourself, do you have tools that you use?

Judith Giesberg: Several writing, several projects ago, I tried to adopt Zotero and and then I gave up on it.

So it's pretty old school.

And again, I was really impressed by listening to other people to answer this question, and, and, and I thought, Oh my God, I need to really go back and rethink the way they do this, because I'm really pretty old school.

I have, you know, I have lots of Word files of that.

I sort of separate by chapter and by kind of notes I'm taking from primary sources, notes I'm taking from secondary sources this project, because it's built on an archive that I've worked on for ever.

It is there.

There.

There was some organizing, pre organizing that occurred because of the work that we put in to making sure that we have really good, solid metadata on all of these advertisements.

So that actually imposed a kind a level of organization that I might not have had otherwise because of of the archive on which it was built, but, but mostly my ways of organization are, you know, are pretty old school kind of spreadsheets.

I have Word files.

I sometimes, you know, when I was writing this book, I started each chapter off by creating a timeline of events that I was able to put together the.

Based on sort of the fragmentary evidence of the various subjects in this book, which starts with this information wanted out, and then builds out.

So I would create timelines in which I could sort of put together as much as I could think that I could get from various pieces of evidence, and then maps to try to sort of visualize their movements and those, you know, I post all over the walls and sort of keep track of of their movements.

And that helps me know when I'm not, kind of sitting and looking through all my Word files and spreadsheets, I can look up and think about a map, you know, I can look at a map and I can think about the timeline and and it'll helps me keep writing.

Kate Carpenter: It may be a difficult question for this project, especially, but when, when in your research process, do you like to start writing?

Judith Giesberg: You know, that's a good question.

I guess this book more than any of the others you know there, each chapter itself is a narrative of of a person, of one person who's trying to find their family members, whereas other books, you know, I might be sort of writing different pieces of it, and then, you know, as I'm sort of working through the primary sources or the secondary sources, and then putting it together, you know, not in kind of a linear fashion like this is the Chapter I'm working on.

Now, this one, I really did, you know, I really did sort of follow the same kind of process with each chapter, you know, like I said, I first, the first thing I needed to do is make sure I had as much as I could figure out about each person's life based on the records I had.

And once I had all, you know, you know, those maps and those timelines, I would then start writing.

But like everybody else in this process, right?

You always, you never know what you need until you're writing, right?

Which others of your guests have have, of course, pointed out, and you yourself know it was a lot of back and forth.

Usually a would start after I had some sense of where I thought the story of this person's life was going to go and then oftentimes, sort of abruptly stop and realize I really needed to get more right.

I needed to find more from from whatever archival is consulting this project too, was different because I had kind of a list of people who had identified that I really wanted to tell their stories, and then I often found, in about a third of the cases that I just didn't have enough confidence in what I could find.

And so there were a lot of stories left out of this book because of just sort of the nature of, you know, of sort of where they wound up after the war, and what kind of, you know, evidentiary base I could build a story on.

So there are a lot of, a lot of stories left out that I was really hoping that, you know, I could get into the into the book.

Kate Carpenter: Well, I feel like we're dancing around this.

So let's talk a little bit about how this project originated, how it emerged so it it's connected to this digital project, which is also called Last Seen.

Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Judith Giesberg: Sure, the Last Seen archive.

We started it here at Villanova, just reading through microfilm of the Christian Recorder, which is a black newspaper still published here at Mother Bethel, here in Philadelphia back in 2016 and then the website went live 2017 and you know, at the time, we had identified these advertisements in that one newspaper, and thought if we could make this archive available to genealogists and people who didn't have access to subscription databases at their libraries, at their universities, like I did, if we could make, you know, the ads just from this one newspaper available free on a website for genealogists.

Then, then we would have done something worthwhile with, you know, with, with these family stories.

So all of them were harvested from newspaper, from microfilm, not from any online databases that you have to pay for.

And so we, you know, once we had about seven or 800 of them, we started to talk to people here in Philadelphia and in some of the neighboring communities, in particular black genealogy groups, and just said, you know, here's a website.

We'd like you to know about it so you can use it for free and and it, it grew from there.

Because every time you talk to an audience, we thought we'd really stumbled on something that was, you know, that people didn't know about a lot of people didn't know about it, but black genealogists had the, you know, this sort of they always offered us advice, and they always thought they Oh, they were sure that what we found in this one newspaper existed in many other newspapers.

So when we talked to an audience, for instance, in Philadelphia, when we first started talking about the project, somebody stood up in the audience.

Audience and and said, Have you looked at the Chicago Defender?

And at the time, we thought, again, we thought we'd find a few 100 of these.

And maybe for 20 or 30 years after the end of the Civil War, they they existed.

And of course, the Chicago Defender doesn't start publishing into the early 20th century.

And that was sort of a moment when my students and I thought, you know this, this might be a this, this project is bigger than one newspaper, and so we haven't.

We're closing in on around 5000 we're, we're right now at 40 713 I think I checked yesterday advertisements from over 100 black newspapers, and the archive, again, has been built within conversation with black genealogy groups who have you know, have guided our development all all the way, and the way that it is designed, if anybody has, if the interviewer readers have ever looked at it is has been very responsive to how it is that they Use an archive like that.

So how, you know, genealogists search for people, and what kinds of features would help them to find people.

So we have maps, as you probably, as people might note, and we have ways, you know, five or six different ways to identify advertisements for people who have, you know, only pieces of information about family members that they're looking for.

Um, so, yeah, so that's the that's how the project began.

That's the Last Seen Project.

Kate Carpenter: Awesome.

I I want to talk about the book in this podcast, but I also want to say that I spent some time with the website, and it is, I mean, it's just such an incredible project, and I hope people listening will go check it out for themselves too.

I am curious, how did working on that project, especially maybe, how, you know, how did going out in the community and talking to people shape what the book became?

Judith Giesberg: It very, it very much was shaped in that experience.

So the, you know, the the question we always get when we're out in the community talking about this project is, do we know people found each other, and, and, and that's always the question that that I never feel like I have a good answer for right?

I mean, my answer is always, you know, I just don't know.

Or, you know, we won't know unless we follow the only way you might know that their most obvious way is sometimes people advertise that they found somebody, but that's pretty uncommon.

Of the nearly, you know, like I said that more than 4700 ads we have there.

We have about 100 that that talk about people finding each other, and some of those are in white newspapers, which we tag white newspapers because we want users to understand that a very small percentage of the ads there, you know, we're published in white newspapers, and we want them to know that right, that you would approach those that it makes sense to approach this differently.

So the only way we would know is, is if they took out a follow up advertisement, which seems unlikely to happen as often as we might want because you have to pay for an advertisement.

Or if you follow them, right, if you sort of follow them through the extant sources and see if you might find, you know, if you find the sort of Holy Grail, right?

You find them in a, in a in a census 10 years later, and lo and behold, those two people who were searching for one another wind up in the same census together.

Or other kinds of evidence where you might find them together again.

So I never really had a really, I never have a good answer for that.

But because it's a website, we also not only get that question from people who were talking to you face to face, but we get user data.

And those you know, few 100, 100 ads that describe a reunion are by far the most popular advertisements on the site.

You know, people want to know how the story ends.

So when I set about to write the book, I, you know, decided that I would do that, that I would try to find that I would follow 10 people in their search for their family members to find out how their story ended, or to get as close to it as I as I could.

And I was very careful when I was pitching the book to my agent first, and then when I started working with my editor, to you know, to say that I that I had, you know, that I chose 10 people without knowing if their story ended in success, because I, you know, I didn't want to cook the books, I didn't want to put my thumb on a scale and and having read, having spent so much time with these stories, it really strikes me that that even when people found each other, that doesn't necessarily mean we have a happy, you know, this sort of urge to have a happy ending, to me is sort of, you know, dangerously close to the way white newspapers like to cover the end of slavery, right?

Like slavery was not that, you know that the late 19th century newspapers lost very much, shaped by a lot.

Cause we're all kind of like slavery was this sort of awful, awful thing, but it's over, it's done, and it, you know, or wasn't that bad, and it all ended happily, right?

And so I was very conscious that right, that the stories that I chose, I had to choose for my own reasons, and those I can explain later, but I didn't choose them knowing if there was going to be, you know, if the ending was going to be a happy one, and, and it was, it was very interesting sort of back and forth because, you know, both then my agent and my publisher, you know, say stuff like, but you're not going to not tell the stories that ended up like, you're not gonna go the other way and like, Oh no, if it ends happily, I won't do that.

No, no, that's not what it was.

You know, it was really very, I was very conscious that I wanted this story to represent what I was, what I think we were seeing in the archive, which is a lot of people searching for a long time, and few of them registering success, at least registering success.

So that's a very long way of answering your question.

But I, you know, from audiences, we clearly were hearing that they wanted to know how the story ended.

And for sure, through our data that we're getting on the website, people really like the stories that end, you know, with with happy endings.

And I get and I get all of that.

And so those things were sort of foremost on my mind, both working to help me think about the choices that I was making and be careful about, right, how, how I told these stories, and whose stories made it into the into the book.

Kate Carpenter: I really appreciate this.

You talk about it a little in the book too, which is how I knew to ask.

And I thought it was really interesting, because we talk a lot on the show about sort of knowing your audience and what they might be looking for.

And I appreciate that this is a reason to know your audience in terms of making sure you're not just giving what they want, or, you know, or sort of like falling into a trap.

So I appreciate that too, right?

There are lots of reasons to want to know your audience and what they're looking for in a book and and how that affects you.

You've written and edited, actually, several books, but this was your first one, as you just mentioned, with an agent and a non University Press.

What was it that prompted you at this point to try that route?

Judith Giesberg: I thought this story in in, I mean, I think it's likely because it originates with this website, right, which is, you know, really intended for an audience well beyond the academy and, you know, and from the beginning, and not really a touching the academy at all.

And because so many of the stories told in the archive are stories that that, you know, I talk about with people all over, you know, all over the country, and we work a lot with teachers, and we're in classrooms, it seemed to me a story that that I really wanted the widest possible audience to engage with.

And so for this book, I decided that I would try to do it this route.

And it is been, it is very, very different from anything I've ever done before the University Press.

I, I have to say.

And of course, you know, you know, and everybody, all the other historians you've talked to, know that it means that you write, that you that much of the peer review is is, is work that you have to do, right?

So, so with this book, I made sure that I workshopped chapters.

I had a couple different writing groups with people who I trust with reading things like a peer reviewer would.

And then I had the extraordinary pleasure of getting to work with Bob Bender at Simon Schuster.

Simon Schuster, who's just legendary and and has edited some of my favorite books of history, and I trusted his a you know, and his guidance from the very beginning.

And it was, it was a great, great honor to work with him.

He's old school editor, and so, you know, I got pages back in which he was, you know, penciling things in and big x's, scratching things out and moving things around and asking me to rethink things.

And it was a it was great learning experience for me, and such an honor to get him to work with work at the on this, you know, and and he was crucial for me to like, there were a few things that I that I will take away from this, like from Bob, I learned that where each of the stories I told in the book ended, which I didn't really know until I, you know, I just kept writing and writing.

I mean, I had the timeline, I had the maps, and I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote until I felt like I had, you know, I until I felt like I had put everything about this person onto, you know, into a chapter.

But that wasn't really what.

But that, you know, that wasn't really going to work for a reader and Bob, you know, Bob would come in and go, Oh, no, no, your chapter ended about six pages ago, right?

It was like, this is where this story ends.

And I, I'm, I'm so grateful to him for doing that.

It also meant that, I think I mentioned this before that.

You know, sometimes the I had to, I was always fighting the urge, and not very well, of putting other people's stories in there, you know, right, like this story was comparable to this other person, and maybe I could put her in here.

I just sort of sneak her in here.

And, and Bob's advice to me always was No, right, really try to fight the urge to get, you know, to get those two or three other person's story into into this chapter.

So it was very different kind of experience than than the kind of University Press experience where you send it out to readers, you get it back, and there's a bit back and forth.

This was much more hands on, and much more, you know, much more back and forth.

Kate Carpenter: So that we could talk in more concrete detail about some of her writing choices, I asked Judy to read an excerpt from her newest book.

This passage comes from the start of chapter four, following the search of a man named Henry Tibbs.

Here is Dr Judith Giesberg reading from Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families.

Judith Giesberg: Henry Tibbs wrote to the papers in search of his mother when he was 55 years old, Tibbs grew up without her in Mississippi.

Fought with the United States Colored Troops during the war, married and had children of his own, all the while holding on to the details about the last time he saw his mother when he was a small child a decade after the war, he wrote a letter to the paper inquiring about her.

He described a series of sales or swaps that took the young boy away from his mother, sending him to New Orleans, the heart of the domestic slave trade, and then on to the Mississippi cotton fields, scenes of young children being wrenched from their mother's arms were common in mid century America, foreign eyewitnesses reported on such incidences in their travel accounts, abolitionists illustrated their tracks with shocking sketches of baby auctions and in their published memoirs, formerly enslaved people relayed details about losing their mothers.

There was nothing exceptional or unusual about what happened to Henry Tibbs, no laws effectively prohibiting the trafficking of young children like him away from their mothers.

The Laws protected the traffickers, men like those named in tips letter to the newspaper.

When emancipation finally came, freed, people's families were in disarray.

Those who had managed to stay together before the war were separated when men and boys enlisted or were impressed into the army and women and those too old or too young to be militarily useful, made their way to refugee camps in abandoned plantations as soon as they could freed women and men.

Sought out federal soldiers, local officials, pastors, missionaries, newspaper editors, employers and neighbors for help finding their children, they went to the papers with everything they remembered and had gathered over the years, including physical descriptions that were eerily reminiscent of fugitive slave ads.

Parents filled their ads with details about their children's faces and hands, Information gleaned from watching them as they slept and holding their hands when they fell.

A father looked for his son, aishen, who was, quote, an albino, white skinned, but of Negro blood with one black spot on his under lip.

A mother wrote for her son William, who had, quote, a full mouth with very short white teeth, a scar on his forehead, just above his right eye.

Someone might recognize a freed woman's daughter, Martha, by the little piece, stripped out of her right ear, another mother hoped the same for her seven year old daughter, Sarah Francis, who was missing quote, the index of the right hand, each shipped ear or fist or missing finger marked a moment in a child's life that their parent recalled vividly, painfully.

Children who were too young to know or name, know a name or recognize a place carried with them something, a scar, perhaps, that might remind them of a father or a mother who had once comforted them.

But when a child like Henry Tibbs was separated from his mother at a young age, he was left with little to begin his search except the memory of that separation and maybe her efforts to prevent it, children had fewer opportunities than adults to fill in the rough outlines of a lost loved.

One with new information gleaned over the years and transmitted via the grapevine Telegraph's many line miles, their memories of lost mothers were frozen in time and could only, with some difficulty and limited success, be mobilized in the search for family lost to the domestic slave trade.

Kate Carpenter: Can you talk to me a little bit about what went into writing this?

Into writing this passage?

Judith Giesberg: Each of the chapters and this one included, begins with the advertisement that the subject of the factor placed, and this advertisement, you know, in this advertisement, Henry Tibbs, as I said in that passage, who's in his 50s, when he writes, it describes the moment when he is in slave jail in Alexandria, and the he that he cried to have his you know, he cries so much that the jailer agreed to bring his mother to him, and so his mother comes to the jail and brings him candy and and cake.

And the jailer asks, you know, his them.

And the jailer, at some point in time, you know, asks his mother to pick him up out of a lot, you know, pick him out out of a lineup and and he, you know, he sort of remembers this moment when his mother comes to the jail and knows him right away and gives him cake and candy so that he will, you know, stop crying.

It's a very emotional when you read this advertisement.

It's, it's, it's full of these wrenching emotions that you can imagine that both Henry and his mother were feeling at the time, knowing that they were to be separated.

But it's also got this little sort of suggestion of this kind of heroic effort that parent you know, that that a parent would make, in this case, his mother's coming to this jail and bringing him some sweets to try to to help her son get over this moment, or to sort of remember her sweetly, or to, you know, to survive this awful experience.

And that, that sort of little bit of heroism.

Runs through a lot of advertisements that were placed by children who were separated from their parents.

We could see that in in a lot of the advertisements actually that done that that are not necessarily even making it into the book, but you know parents who are, you know, going across swollen rivers to to save their children who are about to be sold, or parent tying a you know, tooth to a piece of string and tying it around their child's neck so that they could remember them.

There's a lot of these sort of larger than life memories that live on in a child's heart and mind, that you can see these stories relayed in these advertisements.

So when I was reading Henry Tibbs is advertisement, of course, you know, again, I think I started this by sort of, you know, saying that I tried to outline as much as I can find out about everybody in the ad, and have those outlines, you know, all over my walls and my map.

When there were children who were separated from the parents, the information that a lot of them were able to place in the ads are almost impossible to it's really, really hard to find the people in advertisements, oftentimes taken out by children, in particular, because they're only, you know, they're if they remember any names at all, they would be just a first name, sometimes, of A parent and and sometimes the place names were very difficult to sort of find locations that even carried those names anymore.

So the information is very piecemeal, but that's sort of balanced by these really vivid memories of parents just trying to do whatever they could to help their children.

And so when I started to write about about Henry Tibbs.

I was thinking a lot about that, about what it meant to sort of live through that trauma at a young age.

And of course, Tibbs story, not to give too much of it away, he, you know, when he serves in the army, he's also right.

He's sort of having other experiences that that that we would might think of as trauma, as pretty traumatic experiences.

And then he sits down at the after all of that to relay this story.

And what would it, you know, what does it mean for a person right to hold on to all of these memories for this long and to try to put them down to paper?

And how much of this can we, you know, can be used by descendants of people like, you know, Henry Tibbs is own descendants.

How much of this can be, you know, can we as historians use to sort of try to tell his story, and how much of it do we, you know?

Can we just sort of think about as a, as a, as an act of memory, right, like that.

This is a way for him to remember.

People, even if he you know, even if the information in it was not necessarily going to yield a result, for those of us today who are trying to find out the rest of his story.

Kate Carpenter: I mean, as as this reminds us like it takes incredible research, challenging research, to try to put together these stories, to tell them in the book.

And of course, you couldn't find everything that you would hope to what were your strategies for, sort of filling those gaps or writing around those gaps?

Judith Giesberg: Yeah, so, you know, well, the first thing that that I mentioned before is that sometimes I just felt like I couldn't the gaps were bigger than right.

So I left a lot of stories out, which, which I, you know, which was part of it, part of the struggle between knowing when a story would end, because I always was like, Well, wait a minute, maybe I can just kind of sneak in that person that like, you know, maybe this is a point where I don't want to just leave them totally out of the story.

Maybe I can just sneak them in here and but to fill in the gaps, you know, each story started with these advertisements, and then I had to be able, in order to even begin to tell their story, I had to be able to find people in the advertisement, in in a census or two, just to start with, so that I could find, you know, that I could kind of anchor them in a time and a place.

And then from there, I built out to see what other kinds of sources I could find in government records and intention files or in local news coverage or anything.

And then, with the gaps, I relied quite a lot on some of the extraordinary work done by other scholars of slavery, who, you know, talk a lot about, about archives and and what we can and can't do with them, and how we have to think kind of imaginatively and, you know, empathetically around it, its limitations.

I am inspired by Tiya Miles work right on and sort of the material culture of slavery and sort of memories and things like that, and, you know, and I was thinking I was just catching up Thavolia Glymph's AHA talk that she gave and she talked about, sort of, she described the archive as, as much as boisterous and loud, right?

We sort of have to remember that that, you know, when people talk about this is a sort of counter to the silence of the archive, which he's finds that it is, is, is, is, a lot of sound, right, and a lot of potential for telling stories and those things.

I, you know, I inspired and guided by those.

And then I also, you know, used published Memoirs of, you know, of enslaved people who escaped from the different places that I was researching.

I relied some with some of the later stories on Isabel Wilkerson's stuff about the great you know about these sort of communities of you know, that began the great migration, you know, that was useful and very inspiring to me, especially since some of these people lined up in places like New Jersey and Illinois and Michigan, and so I relied a lot on all this extraordinary work that was done before this Project, and then just sort of trying to, you know, seeing within these sources the potential to at least sort of think about how things like trauma works, to sort of shape memories and and, or limit memories, or predict the way people are, you know, are sort of wrestling with their path.

So there was a lot going on that answer Kate made any sense, but, but I read a lot of things by written by a lot of really smart people, and, you know, use those things as best I can to fill in the blanks.

But as I suggested, sometimes the blanks were too big and and so stories just didn't, didn't make it in there, but they're living on the archive, and maybe somebody else will, you know, somebody else who's better than that I am at this will pick up some of those stories that were that I had to leave behind.

Kate Carpenter: So obviously you've talked about how you needed to be able to have enough there that you could write about people, what, what other factors influenced who you chose to include in the book.

Judith Giesberg: I wanted first and foremost, one of the things i i did was we had about 4000 advertisements in the archive when I started to write.

That's how long it took me.

We're almost 1000 beyond that.

That's a long time.

It took a long time to get this out.

So I so I started by doing kind of just looking at the data on the archive to see what are the most representative kinds of advertisements.

So who are the most likely people who are advertising, and for whom I wanted it to be representative of the archive, and so the most common searcher were some of the most common search.

Teachers are mothers looking for their children and children looking for their mothers also fathers, you know, and then siblings were children were either children looking for their parents or children looking for each other.

Were, you know, heavily represented in the archive.

So the choices that I made were based on the most common searches.

So I sort of sorted people.

I sort of sorted the archive based on the most common kinds of searches.

And those were the ways I organized the chapters.

But I also wanted to get in there some that are numerically not as significant, but also, you know, show the potential for learning something about this generation.

So there's a chapter in there on veterans right who are looking for one another.

So US Colored troop veterans who want to find one another, oftentimes for help with pensions and their widows too.

So that was the first criteria, was, you know what?

What represented the most common kinds of searches that we found in this archive.

And then I also, you know, one of the features on the website is the map that shows you where people are searching from, which is really surprising.

The search is searching from.

You know, some of it's not surprising, right, the concentration on the Eastern Seaboard, but really, you know, people are searching throughout, throughout the country and and in even even outside of the country.

So I wanted the advertisements to represent some of that, or capture some of that geographic diversity.

So I wanted people to be coming, coming from both the East Coast and the West Coast, obviously the Mississippi Valley.

And I wanted stories from, you know, the Midwest as best I could.

So the choices that I made were based both on geographic diversity and then the most common searches.

And so I had, like, several choices for each of those categories, and then I would start to dig.

Kate Carpenter: I'd like to ask, there's a line in the acknowledgements that I'm hoping you'll be up for talking about a little and I know that this is a far more nuanced discussion, probably than we can cover in a podcast, but I'm always interested in how historians think about this question.

So you say, quote, "I wasn't sure this was my book to write, but I do know that it was important to try, because if we don't try to see this history through these subjects eyes, we will be doomed to continue repeating it." Can you talk a little bit more about how you kind of thought of this question of whether something was your your history to write?

Judith Giesberg: Sure, and this is also something that I feel very much as I gone around working on the archive and working with black genealogy groups, that all this is very, you know, this is all very personal.

You know, genealogists are some, you know, they're, they're often looking for their own family members, right?

They're not, you know, they could be professional genealogists, right, working on other people's genealogy.

But they're also always, always, also thinking of this in a very deeply personal terms, of wanting their family tree to be, to be filled out, right, to find their people.

And so, you know, I understand very much that my own family's histories is, you know, is, is, is a different one, right?

My family came to this country as refugees from the Nazis.

And we, you know, we, there are holes in my family's, you know, history that were created from that experience.

And that is, you know, that is sort of my truth and my family's history.

Yet the work that I'm doing is, you know, is about, is about people's family histories that are not mine.

And so I understand that you know, each person who I'm profiling in the book is, you know, likely, could, very likely, have descendants who are alive today, and this is, this is their story, more than it is, you know, than it is anybody else's, including my own.

And so something that my editor and I talked about several times was, you know, did you find, did you did you find descendants of these people living today, which is work that I didn't do, and I am, I am not trained as a genealogist.

I consulted with genealogists as I was writing this, but I didn't do that work, and I'm keenly aware that I don't that that is very that is likely the case.

There are people who actually know people, and you know who are related to or who know people in this in the book, or who might know these names, because that strikes me every time we're talking and I'll say, here's the website, and I start projecting ads, and somebody raises their hand and said, Wait a minute, I'm from that town, and that name sounds familiar.

And then the conversation sort of like the ads were supposed to work.

The conversation then evolves into like, those are my people, and so I'm aware that this is not my family's history, but I.

So feel like, when I was working on this project, I was a I was very keenly aware that people, it is that people do want to know more about the story.

And if I could, you know stories of these individuals, and if I could spend the time trying to find at least 10 of these stories, then I would hope to draw more attention to the work that genealogists do, and the potential for a lot of people to tell their own stories and other stories from this archive.

So when I was writing that I was I'm keenly aware of that, and also write that's operating on the very forefront of my mind as I'm writing the book.

This is not something that I am going to pretend to feel in that very deeply personal way that I might if you know, if these were people who I could rightfully claim as my people.

Kate Carpenter: Okay, I'm gonna shift gears a little for the last bit of our time.

I'd like to hear a little bit about your own inspirations.

So are there specific writers or books that you turn to for inspiration, for your writing?

Judith Giesberg: Yeah that, you know that that varies from time to time.

For this book, and what I and I haven't had enough distance for this book yet to start to think beyond it.

So the answers will be very, very much about right now, and very much what I you know people I've been reading again a lot, you know.

And I mentioned her before, but Tiya Miles' book, All That She Carried, was and I just love the way she writes, all of her stuff that she writes.

And I think that book in particular was really inspiring to me.

And then Ilyon Woo's book on William and Henry Kraft, Master, Slave, Husband, Wife.

Her writing in that book was amazing, you know, you know, she wins the Pulitzer for that.

It's, you know, it's beautiful.

And the way that she brings these characters to life.

And I find her writing to be, to be really inspirational.

Those are a couple of people who I've turned to repeatedly as I was writing this in hopes that I could absorb some of that, you know, amazing creative writing that they do, or the way that in which they bring their characters to life.

So those are a couple of of people and and I've sadly deprived myself of fiction.

So I would just say I'm just kind of sticking with the non fiction right now, but, but I do like to, I do like to read some fiction too, and hopefully, now that this book is out, I can catch up on some fiction reading as well.

So good advice from some of your I've been listening to your your interviews, and I'm getting some good advice about some some fiction reading to catch up on.

Kate Carpenter: What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten?

Judith Giesberg: You know, the old like, butt in the chair, like, you know, sit down and just and write.

And it's not, and it might be ugly, and oftentimes it is ugly, right?

But it's words on a page, and words on a page are better than no words on a page.

So, yeah, the best advice I ever got was, you know, you sit your butt down and you write right, and then you know, and when you think you're done, you write some more again.

It might not be pretty, but it's better than a day of writing is better than, you know, a day of struggling to get your words perfect.

Kate Carpenter: Well, I know you, you just said that with Last Seen, just coming out, you have not had the chance to even think beyond it, which is perfectly reasonable.

But I'm curious how, how do you think about next projects?

How will you go about thinking about what comes next?

Judith Giesberg: You know, I don't know.

I, for me, it always seems like I go through this period of, you know, oh my god, I'm never doing another thing again.

That was way too hard, you know, I just feel like, No, I don't know about you, but, you know, like, especially, usually when you sort of are getting kind of tired and you realize you still have about half of the book left to do.

You're like, This is it.

I'm never going to do.

I'm never going to write another thing again.

And then not too soon out, and not too long after something comes out, you start to, you forget that, and you start to find stories that you either stories that you came across as you were, you know, writing that you wanted to come back to, or just conversations with friends and and and things that you discovered in the archive that you want to come back to.

So I don't know, you know, I a couple of colleagues and myself have, we've long wanted to to look at the experiences of sold we, you know, we had started this conversation about looking at soldiers in the unit union Union army who were charged with sodomy to sort of see if we could understand what that means, and what kinds of you know, what kinds of culture was going on in Union army camps.

And we and this is a conversation we've been having for decades.

And I don't know if we'll ever get get around to doing it, but in the process, we were looking for images of young soldiers and and camp, sort of Camp servants.

So these were young black boys who wound up serving in the Union army.

And some of these images are extraordinary and and they seem to be sort of crying out for kind of a conversation about and these were all from Northern, you know, these were all from Union regiment.

So there's this, this very interesting kind of dynamic between Union soldiers and young black boys and young men that, really, you know, that kind of got my attention.

And I think maybe hopefully, we'll get back together, these colleagues of mine and I to to re tackle this, these experiences within army camps, not only of sort of same sex relationships, but also these very young, young boys who are winding up in some of these camps, and what is their experience like, and what can it tell us, really, about the culture of the urban north and and and race relations?

And so that's one thing that is kind of there, but maybe not right away.

Yeah, I have to have to talk myself into that writing advice, right?

That I wish you right.

That means you got to sit in your chair.

You got to write the words.

Kate Carpenter: Maybe it's okay to get out of the chair for a little while.

Judith Giesberg: Yeah, I think I'm gonna stand up and get out of the chair a little bit, and then we'll see so and read some of the good stuff that I haven't, you know, some of the stuff I haven't got to read.

Kate Carpenter: Dr.

Judy Giesberg, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.

Judith Giesberg: Thank you, Kate.

This was a this was a great pleasure.

Kate Carpenter: Thanks for joining me for this episode of Drafting the Past to find links to the books we talked about and a transcript of this episode along with past episodes, visit draftingthepast.com.

There you can also sign up for the newsletter to stay up to date on new episodes and other history writing news.

Until next time, I'm host and producer Kate Carpenter, reminding you that friends don't let friends write boring history.