The Surprising People-Finder in The Book of Lost Friends
Lisa Wingate uses historical artifacts to craft a story
1875: Ten years after the Civil War
Imagine yourself smack-dab in 1875. You travel by horseback, on foot, or in wagons. No radio. No television. No internet. No social media. The telephone, just introduced four years ago, is in its infancy and exists only in the homes of a few wealthy people. You get news from a few wanderers who come through town, or possibly from old newspapers that circulate from hand to hand.
Recently freed from slavery, you’re desperately searching for people lost to you for decades and scattered in states throughout the entire South.
How could you ever hope to find family members who frequently move from place to place without official record-keeping? How do you track people whose very names have been changed so that even their identities are altered? What do you do to determine whether a friend is alive or dead?
This is the central question of The Book of Lost Friends by Lisa Wingate, a novel that uses real historical artifacts to illustrate a surprising kind of “people-finder” in a world before computers, G.P.S., and social media.
