“There Is No Place Like a Happy Home”: Information Wanted Notices, the Christian Recorder, and the Search for Missing Family Members in Post-Emancipation America

Abstract

This article considers the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) newspaper, the Christian Recorder's publication of the formerly enslaved “Information Wanted” advertisements through the mid-1860s to turn of the century as a means through which the AME promoted the ideal of the “family” as positive models for Blacks themselves, also challenging white prejudices concerning family life of the formerly enslaved. Conversely, the formerly enslaved used them as a public forum to narrate, and perhaps begin to make sense of, their own stories of loss and longing and articulating white southern responsibility for the heartache and traumas of slavery that they had caused.