William Chapman seeking information on his brother and two sisters.

Hamza Dehaini · 2020-09-28T06:13:25.893Z

1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. Question: How many families actually reunited from posting an ad and somebody found them from the ad?

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?

3 Comments

Qianhui (Jenny) Guo

Sep 29, 2020

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.