A Review of "Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery"

Help Me to Find My People is an emotional book. That is, Heather Andrea Williams (currently an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has prepared and published a study in which feelings figure prominently. By skillfully using an array of primary source materials, such as census data, records of the Freedmen's Bureau and other governmental agencies, newspapers, journals, letters, slave narratives, and fictional writings, the author insightfully and evocatively depicts the interior lives of enslaved black people. In so doing, Williams makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on slavery in the United States.