What do you notice? What do you wonder? There were a few things I found interesting about this ad. One is that there isn't much information about his family, like how they look like, etc. He just states the names of his brother and sisters and their previous "owner", and askes if anyone knows their whereabouts. He gave little information, but then he gave his address which I was was different than the rest. I wonder if he managed to actually get his siblings back. William was also part of a church in the area. It's kind of crazy how he went from a slave with his siblings to having a role in a church.
Time/Place: This ad took place in around San Diego, California on the date April 22, 1897. This was a few decades after the Civil War. I saw a few other posts and I don't think the time period was different from the rest. It makes sense that former slaves were split up from their family and now they're trying to reunite. What was interesting was the location. Most ads took place in the south east area where slavery was very common right before the civil war. However, they were only a few articles in the west compared to the rest of the US, which is pretty interesting.
Implications/Conclusions: There was a trend of articles of missing family members in the southeast region. Knowing history and how the south didn't want slavery to end, this isn't surprising. There were hardly any articles in the western region of the US which also makes sense from the same reason. I'm still curious whether William found his family with such little information. Maybe there wasn't a big population of people then and everyone knew everyone so that specific information isn't as necessary like it is today.
Question: How many families actually reunited from posting an ad and somebody found them from the ad?
I think this question is really difficult to answer with an exact number. During the time we could not tell whether most of the people would get access to the information ad, whether they could connect each other after seeing the ad. There must be a lot of circumstances under different conditions. However, it is still a good tool for them to find their families as it always adds one more chance for them to reunite.
I think we could never really find out how many families were actually reunited through these ads. Although there's a website full of these ads and many articles telling the story of reunited loved ones, we could never account for those stories and ads that were lost in time. Additionally, gathering information during that period wasn't as reliable as it is today. Letters and newspapers can be burned, lost, damaged and never made it to the resources we have today.
Hi Hamza! It is so cool you found an ad from San Diego. I was also curious about Rev. Chapman's role in the AME Church. I wonder if his role as the pastor was one of the reasons why he moved to the west, since as you noted, this wasn't such a common practice among formerly enslaved people. I wish I knew an exact answer for your question about how effective these ads were. There were so many of them placed that I believe they were useful. I was thinking about how scanning through information wanted ads might just become a regular practice for those who hadn't been able to locate loved ones, to see if any names stood out to them.