He Died Enslaved. His Blood Reached the 21st Century Anyway.

The 360-year story of one man — and the fourteen generations he became

There is a man at the beginning of my family tree who has no last name.

Not because no one gave him one. Because the legal system of colonial Virginia decided he was property, and property doesn’t need a surname. He is recorded in the documents only as Aminadab — or sometimes “Haw,” a word whose meaning has been lost to time, tagged onto him by people who may or may not have understood what it meant. He was enslaved on a tobacco plantation on Nandua Creek, Accomack County, Virginia, sometime around 1648.

He died before April 14, 1665. Still enslaved. Still without a last name. Still property.

And yet here I am.

Nandua Creek, 1648–1665

To understand Aminadab, you have to understand the world he was born into.

Nandua Creek runs through what is now the Eastern Shore of Virginia — the long, flat finger of land between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, separated from the Virginia mainland by open water. In the mid-seventeenth century, this was the absolute edge of the English colonial world. The plantation economy was young and brutal. Tobacco was king. Labor was extracted from the bodies of indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people in roughly equal measure, and the legal distinctions between those categories were still being invented in real time.

The man who enslaved Aminadab was named Southy Littleton. We know this from the colonial court records that document what came after — from the name his son carried in parentheses forever, tagged like a bill of sale: Aminidab “Haw” Handsor (LITTLETON). Littleton was a landowner on Nandua Creek. Aminadab was his.

What Aminadab’s life looked like on that plantation — what language he spoke, where he came from before Virginia, what he knew about himself and his history — none of that survived. The records didn’t care. He appears in the documentary record only through what he left behind: a son.

Sometime around 1664, Aminadab fathered a child with a free woman named Mary Vincent. Mary was white, or white enough by colonial reckoning to be classified as free. Their son — born April 14, 1664, on Nandua Creek — was also born free, because freedom in Virginia at that time followed the mother’s status, not the father’s. The child’s name was Aminidab, after his father. He was given the surname Handsor — likely a phonetic rendering of “Handzor” or some variant, the origins of which are unclear.

Aminadab the father never knew what his son would become. He died before April of 1665, still enslaved, before the boy was a year old. He left nothing behind in the official record except a birth date, a death that no one bothered to document precisely, an enslaver’s name attached to his like a brand, and one free child on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

That child was my ancestor. Fourteen generations and 360 years later, I was born at Nanticoke Memorial Hospital in Seaford, Delaware.

The Child Who Walked Out of Virginia

The boy who would become Aminidab Handsor Sr. grew up in Mary Vincent’s world — the world of the Okey family, who had taken the Vincents into their orbit. Mary Vincent married a man named John Okey in October 1666. John Okey was a complicated figure in colonial Delmarva history: a landowner, a litigant, a man who named one of his land patents Mollattoe Hall in explicit acknowledgment of his family’s mixed-race identity. That name — Mollattoe Hall — is a small act of extraordinary defiance, recorded in the Sussex County deed books in 1686, the landowner himself marking the property with the word colonial society used to shame his family.

In 1671, when Aminidab was about seven years old, the colonial court recorded something remarkable: “Mary Oakey ‘with her child Aminadab Haw’, transported to Maryland from Virginia by John Oakey.” The family was moving north. And they took the boy — Mary’s son by the enslaved man who had died before he was a year old — with them.

Think about what it meant to be that child. To have a father who died in bondage before you could know him. To carry his name and something of his face through a world that would spend the rest of your life trying to categorize you, diminish you, erase you. To walk north with a family that claimed you as their own while the colonial courts watched and waited for an opportunity to decide what you were.

The family settled eventually in Indian River Hundred, Sussex County, Delaware — the heart of what was then the Nanticoke homeland. This is not a coincidence. The Nanticoke people had been the dominant Indigenous presence on the Delmarva Peninsula for centuries. By the 1670s, colonial pressure had fragmented the formal tribal structure, but the land and its people remained. The Indian River community that the Okeys, Vincents, and young Aminidab joined was already a mixing place — free Black families, poor white settlers, and Nanticoke survivors building something new in the margins of the colonial world.

The Free Man on the Courthouse Steps

We know almost nothing about Aminidab Handsor’s childhood. What we know is what he looked like as a young adult: formidable enough to testify in a colonial court.

In 1688, a Sussex County cattle theft case came before the court. The defendant was John Barker. The witnesses included — among others — Aminadab Hansor, aged 24 years or thereabouts. He testified. He spoke. He was a free man on the courthouse steps, his name entered into the permanent record of colonial Delaware.

The deposition reads: “Doth Declare that hee was with John Barker in Accomacke in the year 1686…” He had traveled. He had business. He had a life that crossed colonial boundaries and left a paper trail. In the same case, John Okey, Mary Okey, and John Okey Jr. all testified — three generations of the family that had brought him north from Virginia, standing in the same courthouse. And Rose Hanser, who would become his wife, testified too. A whole community, assembled in a colonial courtroom, arguing about cattle.

The detail that stops me is this: the court recorded his age as 24. Born 1664. In 1688, he would have been exactly 24. Somebody was counting. Somebody knew his birth year. In a world where the birth dates of enslaved people and their children were rarely considered worth preserving, someone — maybe Aminidab himself — made sure the record was accurate.

He was born on Nandua Creek, the son of a man who died enslaved. He stood in a Sussex County courthouse as a free man, a witness whose testimony mattered. That distance — from Nandua Creek to the Sussex County courthouse — is not just geography. It is everything.

Eight Years Later: Two Hundred Acres

In 1696, Aminidab Hanser purchased 200 acres of land in Indian River Hundred, Sussex County, Delaware.

Read that again. The son of an enslaved man. A free man of color in colonial Delaware. Buying land.

The parcel was called Ebenezer — part of a larger tract that he purchased with a man named Edward Cary. The land sat in the heart of Indian River Hundred, not far from where the Okey family had held their Mollattoe Hall patent a decade earlier. The land records show Aminidab buying, selling, and consolidating over the following years. The Ebenezer tract would remain in the hands of the Hanzer family and their in-laws — passing between Hanzers and Okeys and their descendants — for more than sixty years.

He built something. On ground that his father never touched, in a colony his father never knew, Aminidab Handsor planted roots. He raised children. He gave them his name. He gave them land. He gave them the one thing his father could not give him: a future with a foundation under it.

When Aminidab Handsor Sr. died on December 8, 1725, in Sussex, Delaware, he died a free man on land he owned. His father died a slave. That gap — 1665 to 1725, Nandua Creek to Indian River Hundred — is the distance one man’s life traveled, and it opened a door that stayed open for every generation that followed.

Three Hundred Years of Staying

What happened after Aminidab is in many ways the deeper story. Because the easy version of this history ends with him — the enslaved father, the freed son, the land purchase, the triumph. But history is rarely that clean.

What the Sussex County tax rolls show, from 1767 to 1801, is that the Hanzer family kept building and kept losing and kept persisting. By 1777, seven Hanzer men were taxed in Indian River and Angola Hundreds simultaneously — Samuel, Jonathan, Jonathan Jr., John, William Jr., Thomas, William. By 1784, nine. By 1796, fourteen distinct Hanzer households.

And in the same rolls, scrawled in a different hand in 1789, the assessor’s notes: “Jona Hanzer a poore Melato” — Jonathan Hanzer, once on the regular tax rolls, now unable to pay. “Aaron Hanzer The Same as Jona.” A family that had owned land and paid taxes for nearly a century, now caught in the grinding poverty that colonial and early American racial politics reserved for people like them.

The same tax rolls that record their poverty also record, in 1777, the assessor labeling a section of names “Nanticoke Names.” The Sockum family. The Salmons. The community of Indian River Hundred, identified in the government’s own hand as Native. The Hanzers were being taxed alongside families the colonial government explicitly knew to be Nanticoke. They were part of that world. They were of that world.

The racial category assigned to the Hanzers shifted with whoever was filling out the paperwork. “Negro.” “Mulatto.” “Free white.” “Free colored.” “Indian complexion.” The federal seamen’s papers from the 1830s and 1850s — identity documents issued by the U.S. government to protect sailors from British impressment — record James Hansor in 1831 with “Indian complexion,” witnessed by Cary Hansor. Record T. Robinson Hanzar in 1858 with “Indian complexion.” Record Eli Harmon from Indian River with “Indian complexion, Indian, black straight hair.”

They knew what they were. The paperwork around them argued about it constantly. They persisted regardless.

The Cemetery Where They All Sleep

Between Harbeson and Millsboro, Delaware, on a road that cuts through what was once the heart of the Indian River community, there is a cemetery.

Harmony United Methodist Church Cemetery.

The Native Americans of Mitsawokett project surveyed it in July 2005. Their records show what is there: HARMON stones going back generations. JOHNSON. MORRIS. CLARK. STREET. SOCKUM. MOSLEY. The same surnames that appear in the 1770s tax rolls, in the 1688 court depositions, in the 1696 land deeds.

And HANZER. John C. Hanzer, born March 10, 1838, in Millsboro — his stone giving his age in years, months, and days, the way the old stones do. And beside him, Sorphor J. Hanzer — Sophia Jane — born April 20, 1842, died September 18, 1912. The stone gives her nickname and her full name both, as if the person who ordered it wanted to make sure no one confused her with anyone else. Her maiden name was Harmon. Her mother’s maiden name was Sammons — the same Sammons family that a Canadian census would record, in 1861 and 1871, as Indian.

John C. Hanzer and Sophia Jane Harmon Hanzer were my direct ancestors. Their daughter Mary Anna Hanzer married Jeremiah Thompson in the 1870s. Their daughter Mary Elizabeth Thompson married William James Thompson. Their son Samuel Lenard Thompson — born July 6, 1892, in Dagsboro, Sussex County — married Martha Jackson of Lewes, Delaware.

They had a daughter named Phoebe.

The House on Indian River

Phoebe Thompson was born September 27, 1920, in Sussex County, Delaware. She grew up in the Indian River Hundred community that her family had occupied, in one form or another, for two hundred and fifty years. She married William Wesley Davis of Millsboro — son of Morris Davis, whose death in 1916 was reported to the state of Delaware by a member of the Harmon family, because in this community, you showed up for each other when someone died.

William Wesley Davis’s family had their own roots running deep into the same Indian River soil. His grandmother was Nancy J. Carmean, born 1828 in Sussex County — from the Carmean family that appears in the Delmarva records as far back as the 18th century, another documented triracial family of the Eastern Shore. His mother was Hester Anne Morris, born 1877, from the Morris family that appears in the Indian River tax rolls from 1774 onward. All roads in this community led back to the same watershed.

Phoebe and William Wesley Davis had a daughter: Joan Ellen Davis, born in 1945, in Delaware.

Joan had a daughter: Jane Ellen Davis, born 1965, in Millsboro, Sussex County, Delaware — three hundred and one years after Aminidab Handsor was born on Nandua Creek in Accomack County, Virginia.

April 1989. Seaford, Delaware.

Nanticoke Memorial Hospital.

That is where I was born. In a hospital named after the people whose land my family has occupied since 1671. Named after the nation the tax assessor identified in the official government record in 1777 with the words “Nanticoke Names.” Named after the people whose survivors built the Indian River Hundred community alongside freed Black families and poor white settlers, creating something that colonial Virginia didn’t have a category for and colonial Delaware spent two hundred years trying to reclassify out of existence.

The founding ancestor of my Hanzer line is tagged in my own family tree with the notation: (Nanticoke?) — a question mark that the genealogist put there because the evidence pointed somewhere that the official record refused to confirm. But the question mark is doing a lot of work. The Sockum family that the 1777 tax assessor called Nanticoke married into my Harmon family. The Sammons family that the Canadian census called Indian was my great-great-grandmother Sophia Jane’s mother’s family. The seamen’s papers recorded Indian complexion for my Hanzer ancestors across thirty years of federal documentation.

And I was born at Nanticoke Memorial Hospital.

What the DNA Says

When my DNA came back, it showed what the history already told:

West African foundation — the blood of Aminadab the Elder, the man enslaved on Nandua Creek, and the generations of African heritage that preceded him. Central and East African markers carried in the Y-chromosome, specific to B-F1493/Z65, a haplogroup rooted in the African interior. A consistent 1–2% Amerindian signal across twenty-plus separate admixture calculators — small enough to be invisible to most tests, large enough to show up consistently when you run enough of them. Northwestern European ancestry, threading through Mary Vincent and the generations of intermarriage that followed. And two markers — EDAR and ABCC11 — associated with Austronesian and East Asian populations, possibly tracing back through Nanticoke ancestry itself.

The geneticists call a 1% Amerindian signal “trace.” Genealogically, it corresponds to one ancestor who was fully Indigenous roughly six generations back, or multiple partially Indigenous ancestors spread across more generations. That math lines up precisely with what the documents show: a founding ancestor tagged “(Nanticoke?)” in the colonial record, marrying into a community that the government labeled “Nanticoke Names” in 1777, generating descendants who identified themselves to federal officials as having “Indian complexion” across three decades of documentation.

The DNA doesn’t prove the history. The history proves the history. The DNA just shows that the history left a biological signature that 360 years of intermarriage and reclassification hasn’t fully erased.

What He Left

Aminadab — the man with no surname, the man who died enslaved on Nandua Creek before his son turned one year old — left nothing that the colonial record considered worth preserving.

No will. No inventory. No land. No document in his own name. Not even a certain death date: only “before April 14, 1665,” because that’s when his son’s birth was recorded and the timeline only runs one direction.

What he left was a child.

That child walked out of Virginia at age seven, clinging to Mary Vincent Okey’s hand or running ahead of the cart or lagging behind to look at something that caught his eye. That child grew up to stand in a courthouse and give testimony. Grew up to buy two hundred acres of Delaware land. Grew up to plant a family in the same soil where the Nanticoke had lived for centuries.

That family stayed.

Through the tax rolls that recorded them as “poore Melato” and the seamen’s papers that recorded them as “Indian complexion” and the census records that changed their race depending on who was doing the counting and what year it was and what agenda the enumerator carried. Through the Civil War and Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the slow institutional grinding that tried to turn them into nothing. Through the decades when the family was scattered to Philadelphia and Bridgeton and beyond, when the Harmony Cemetery absorbed generation after generation back into Indian River Hundred soil.

They stayed on that ground, or they came back to it, or they were buried in it. John C. Hanzer. Sophia Jane Harmon Hanzer. Charles “Charlie” Morris Davis. Elsie Rebecca Davis. Harry Edward Davis. Hersel Rodney Davis. The same Millsboro, the same Indian River Hundred, the same few miles of Delaware that Aminidab Handsor purchased with his own money in 1696.

And on April 1989, at Nanticoke Memorial Hospital in Seaford, Delaware — in a hospital named for the nation that this land always belonged to — Jane Davis, of Millsboro, had a son.

They named him Jequan.

That’s me.

Sources for this post include: Paul Heinegg’s Free African Americans database (Record #44, Hanzer; Record #71, Okey); the Shearer-Schaeffer compilation “Okey Family in America”; Sussex County tax rolls 1767–1801 (Delaware State Archives RG 2535); the Native Americans of Mitsawokett project (nativeamericansofdelawarestate.com), including the Harmony Cemetery survey (July 2005), the Aminidab Handsor family history, the Nathaniel Commean family history, and the Isaac W. & Sarah Jane Sockum Harmon photo page; the Mitsawokett “Identified Indians” records (Betty Harrington Macdonald, 1992); Delaware State death certificates; and the Davis Family Tree GEDCOM (Ancestry.com, 2026).

Continue the journey: Amindab’s Nanticoke roots connect directly to Lydia E. Clark, the “Last” Nanticoke. For another branch of this lineage, see Comfort Harmon: A Matriarch of Delaware’s Free People of Color.

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