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In June 1865, a woman named Hannah Cole placed a notice in a Philadelphia newspaper. She was searching for her son John, whom she had last seen in Alexandria, Virginia, before she was sold south to New Orleans.

She was one of a million.

In this sitting, Jeliba and Nia follow the Slave Trail of Tears — the forced migration of enslaved people from the Upper South into the cotton South between 1810 and 1860. We walk with the 1834 Franklin & Armfield coffle from Duke Street in Alexandria, through Winchester, and down the same Shenandoah Valley road we traveled in "The Wagon Road," today's Route 11.

We set this trail beside the Indian Trail of Tears, with respect for both. And we find they were not two stories but one: Native nations were driven off the land, and enslaved people were marched in to work it. Some Black people walked both trails.

Then Jeliba turns to the question that matters most for listeners: what records can still find the people the road tried to erase — ship manifests, bills of sale, Freedmen's Bureau records, and the "Lost Friends" notices freedpeople placed for fifty years, searching for family.

Kevin Bearden, the keeper who brought us this story, joins near the end to reflect on living along that road and on his years working with a Cherokee Nation Businesses company in Tulsa.

A note on voices: Jeliba and Nia are synthesized voices. Kevin's segment is voiced with his own ElevenLabs voice clone.

Chapters 0:00 — Hannah Cole's search

1:08 — Ask the Griot

1:44 — The trade, the road, two Trails of Tears, and the records

13:49 — Kevin Bearden

14:52 — Closing: "Ain't you my child?"

16:46 — Outro

Resources for this episode: - Lost Friends database — Historic New Orleans Collection — hnoc.org/database/lost-friends - Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery — Villanova University — informationwanted.org - Edward Ball, "Retracing Slavery's Trail of Tears," Smithsonian Magazine (November 2015) — smithsonianmag.com - Freedom House Museum, 1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia — the former Franklin & Armfield office - Enslavement in the Shenandoah Valley — National Park Service — nps.gov - Teaching Hard History: American Slavery — Learning for Justice — learningforjustice.org - Tip: if your family appears in Mississippi, Louisiana, or Alabama after the war but the trail goes cold, try searching Lost Friends by the name of the county or the enslaver your ancestors lived under before freedom.