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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Ten months after the Civil War ended, a woman named Elizabeth Williams was trying to piece

her life back together.

Now living in California, Elizabeth was looking for answers from her past.

Before the war, she was enslaved.

She had four children, but she was separated from them decades earlier

after she was sold. The last time she saw them was 25 years earlier in Woodbury, Tennessee.

Now a free woman, Elizabeth was determined to find them.

Information wanted by a mother concerning her children.

She placed an ad in the Christian recorder of Philadelphia paper with a large black readership.

Lydia, William, Alan, and Parker, who lived about six miles.

The recorder was the official newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,

which, according to the church's history, significantly expanded its membership across the South during Reconstruction.

Elizabeth wasn't alone in her quest, or it turns out how she searched.

She has never seen the above named children since.

Any information given concerning them, however, will be very gratefully received

by one whose love for her children survives the bitterness and hardships of many

long years spent and slavery.

Torn apart and seeking help to reunite with their loved ones, former slaves placed notices

in black-owned newspapers

...