NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — On January 1st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation Executive Order that would define his presidency and the country. Life was anew for the enslaved, now formerly enslaved. However, the nature of slavery was that it had been the destroyer of the family structure of African Americans. For over 200 years, families were sold apart, names were given and taken and intimate human connections were dissolved. The question now, was how would far apart families reunite?
Diane Plauché is a former employee at The Historic New Orleans Collection and says, “the Lost Friends are advertisements that were taken out in the Southwestern Christian Monitor Newspaper. Formerly enslaved people after the Civil War were in search of their family members, who they were separated from. To make connections, they would take out these ads that would read weekly around the Southeast, in states, like Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Hundreds of advertisements were placed starting in 1897 and lasted into the early 20th century. A few years ago, Diane Plauché was helping with an exhibition dedicated to the story of enslaved people. That exhibition became the catalyst for creating a Lost Friends digital database out of the old Lost Friends advertisements.
“I helped in the beginning with the entry of slave manifests that would come into the port of New Orleans. I was asked to do the database of the Lost Friends advertisements. A lot of this ties in with my passion about it. The family I married into are descendants from Main who owned a cotton plantation.”
Diane entered over 25 hundred newspaper advertisements into the database. Each advertisement is categorized by the date it was placed, the name of the person placing the advertisement and the mentioning of associated states, parishes, counties and cities. Also noted are the names of previous owners of the enslaved, followed by a list of family members sought after.
Jessica Dorman is The Historic New Orleans Collection’s Director of Publications and says, “what is really powerful to me, is to look at the ads that were placed in 1905, to realize that four decades have passed and the rift is still present. People who were children at the time of the Civil War are still aching every day.”
Over the years, the database has been expanded and integrated into an online network of ancestry research. Two years ago, the database was used for the publishing of New York Times best-selling novel, The Book of Lost Friends. The story of American slavery and race continues to be written.
“People always ask if there were an found friends. Out of the 2,500 that I entered, there might have only been about 10 to 20 found ads. Part of that, that in order to place the ad, you needed 50 cents. That was a lot. I’m hopeful that there were more found relatives, who simply didn’t have enough money to place the ad in the paper,” explains Diane Plauché.