Dr. Giesberg’s Captivating Presentation of the Last-Seen Ad
- Maggie Lipson
- Mar 20
- 2 min read
By Christopher Samuel ‘26 (Assistant Editor)
A hush fell over Shallcross Hall’s Meeting Room as Dr. Judith Giesberg, the distinguished visiting humanities lecturer, took the stage. It was Thursday night, 7:00, and the room was filled with students, family members, faculty, and alumni eager to hear what Dr. Giesberg had to say. After a thorough and compelling introduction from Danielle Saint-Hilaire, the history department chair, it was time for Dr. Giesberg to present the history of last-seen ads.
Dr. Giesberg is a history professor who holds the Robert M. Birmingham Chair in the Humanities at Villanova University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She’s written six books, including her newest, the companion to the night’s lecture, Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families. This latest project, as its name suggests, chronicles the attempts of the formerly enslaved to reunite with family members from whom they were intentionally and brutally separated as part of the system of slavery. This was done by a clever inversion of the wanted ad — instead of an ad to find a criminal or adversary, the last-seen ads were put out in the hopes of finding information about separated family members. In addition to her book, published in February 2025, she, along with her students at Villanova, has also compiled a database of almost 5,000 easily searchable last-seen ads from over 300 newspapers at https://informationwanted.org/.
The lecture itself provided an intriguing survey of the timeline and stories of last-seen ads. Dr. Giesberg presented several such ads, highlighting patterns, methods of resistance, and strategies of the authors that would give them the greatest chance of reuniting with their families. Opening up for questions, she discussed the endangerment her work faces due to the cutting of government spending, her research process and its difficulties, and additional context for the time period in which the ads were written and published.
It was end-to-end a valuable and engaging talk, and Friends’ Central is delighted to have hosted it. A big thank you to Dr. Judith Giesberg for being this year’s distinguished visiting humanities speaker!
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