The Founding Family You’ve Never Heard of: The Black Tuckers of Hampton, Virginia

Rick Hampson and Deborah Barfield Berry
USA TODAY

HAMPTON, Va. – As Walter Jones walks his family’s ancient cemetery, shovel in hand, he wonders about those who rest there.

The gravestones date back as far as the 1800s. Some bear the names of folks Walter knew; some have faded to illegibility; some are in pieces. And, under the brush he’s cleared away and the ground he’s leveled, there are burial sites unmarked by any stone.

The cemetery means so much to Walter because his extended family – the Tuckers of Tidewater, Virginia – believe they are as much an American founding family as any from the Mayflower.

They have a widely recognized but possibly unprovable claim: that they are directly descended from the first identified African American people born on the mainland of English America, an infant baptized “William” around 1624.

It’s been 400 years this August since William’s parents arrived in the Virginia colony. The Tuckers, like many African Americans, struggle to trace their roots. They have no genealogical or DNA evidence linking them to those first Africans, but they have oral history and family lore.

And they have the cemetery, a repository of what unites them and what baffles them.

This graveyard, Walter says, is “the only thing you can actually put your hands on, put your eyes on.’’

He’s thinking of that July day two years ago. He was leveling earth when the blade of his shovel hit something solid.

He looked down. A round, gray object seemed to have emerged from the dirt. He dug under it a little and lifted it up. It looked like a section of a bowl.

He moved more dirt and spotted something else round and gray. He brushed it off and held it against the first object to see if they fit together.

He didn’t realize it at first, but he was holding a human skull.

Researchers would conclude that it belonged to an African American woman who was about 60 when she died – roughly Walter's age. But they couldn’t say when.

That night, the woman was all Walter could think about. She embodied every question, every possibility, about his family’s origins. And he’d held her in his bare hands.

The Tuckers want to know their story because our stories help define us. Especially those that explain where we came from.

Many Americans can find out from a Norddeutscher Lloyd Line manifest or an Ellis Island log or a parish registry in Cork, Palermo or Cornwall. For African Americans, it’s not so easy. Their story, often as not, was stripped from them.

This is a story about one family’s search for its story. It’s about a storyteller who loved that story maybe too much; the searchers following in her path; and the mysterious old cemetery that, some feel, holds the key.

The Tuckers believe their American story started in 1619. According to a letter by the tobacco planter John Rolfe, the widower of Pocahontas, a ship landed in England’s 12-year-old Jamestown settlement and “brought not anything but 20, and odd, Negroes, which the Governor and the Cape Merchant bought for victuals’’ – provisions.

The “20 and odd’’ already had been through hell.

They were taken prisoner of war in what is now Angola by African mercenaries working with the Portuguese; marched to the Atlantic coast, where they were branded, penned, forcibly baptized; and finally chained head-to-foot below deck on a Spanish ship headed for Mexico and a life of slavery. 

The San Juan Bautista carried about 350 enslaved people, more than a third of whom died on the crossing. Then, in the Gulf of Mexico, the ship was attacked by two English privateers – pirates under a foreign flag of convenience. The two ships carried about 60 of the Africans north toward Virginia.

Virginia had no law to permit or ban slavery. But the Africans became slaves in fact, if not law. In 1624, two of them, identified as Anthony and Isabella, were listed in the household of Capt. William Tucker, a military commander and settler.

The following year, the two appear again in a census, this time along with “William theire Child Baptised.’’ Another African child, unnamed, also appears for the first time in the same 1625 census. But William is the first identified by name.

The Tuckers believe that he is their founding father; that William was surnamed Tucker, after Capt. Tucker; and that their ancestors lived on or near Bluebird Gap Farm, site of Capt.Tucker’s plantation, in what is today the city of Hampton.

But the Tuckers have so far been unable to prove their claims to the satisfaction of most historians and genealogists.

An African Ancestry DNA test for a family elder, Floyd Tucker, showed that his DNA coincided with that found in a tribe in what is today Ghana – not Angola, from where William’s parents came.

It’s unclear how far William’s line goes forward, and how far the Tuckers’ goes back. A professional historian hired by the family has yet to find anything to narrow the gap. 

One problem is that England’s American colonists kept poor records; settlers were more concerned about making it through winter or fighting Indians. Often, what records were kept subsequently were destroyed, by everything from fire to worms.

Today, experts say that any family – white or black – is hard-pressed to establish genealogical connections before 1800 unless their ancestors were rich, famous or criminals.

Just because the Tuckers can’t document their connection doesn’t mean they don’t have one, said Beth Austin of the Hampton History Museum. “But it’s really still just a theory. That’s all we can go on.”

Did William survive infancy in the precarious colony? Did he have children? Did his children have children? Regardless, he was the symbolic beginning of so much in American life – of the hands that picked the cotton that financed the Industrial Revolution; of jazz and gospel and hip-hop; of Ellison and Baldwin and Morrison; of King and Malcolm and Fannie Lou Hamer; of the Afro, the high-five and the dunk shot.

And yet, after he was baptized – on a date and in a place unknown – history’s first identified African American simply vanished.

An American griot

None of the Tuckers loved the story like Thelma Williams.

As a child she’d listen for hours to her grandmother, who’d been born sometime in the last quarter of the 19th century. The old woman told of family recipes and remedies, about slave uprisings and Indian wars. While other children played or did their chores, Thelma listened, rapt.

Of all these stories, her grandmother told her, there was one she had to remember: We were on the first slave ship to come to America, and we are descended from the first black child born here.

The girl was skeptical. How do you know, grandma? In a 1998 interview with The Associated Press, she recalled the answer: “Don’t you know that if you take a dog down the street, he’ll find his way home? Well, child, we’re human beings and we’re much more intelligent than animals. We need to know where we came from. And if we put our minds to it, we always find our way home.’’

Many members of the Tucker family still live within miles of the place they believe their ancestors first landed at Point Comfort, now Fort Monroe Monument. Whether near or far, they meet regularly to celebrate milestones like Carol Tucker Jones 88th birthday.

Although the idea that the Tuckers went back to the first Africans in America had circulated in the family for years, it was slowly dying until Thelma grew up and got her hands on it.

She spent days in courthouses and libraries across eastern Virginia, checking birth records and deeds. She tracked down family elders, usually leaving the visit with a photograph or two. She went to Richmond. She went to Washington. She filled a spare bedroom in her small house in Hampton with her research, including stacks of handwritten notes.

Her grandmother’s story was proving true. There had been a child of the first Africans who’d lived in the household of a white man named Tucker. Tucker had a plantation near what is today a public park in Hampton called Blueberry Gap Farm. And once, when an elderly Tucker was brought by his children to the farm, he blurted out, “This was our home.’’

Thelma came to understand, she told the AP, the importance of the Tuckers’ connection to that first African child: “It’s important that people know we didn’t just fall out of the sky.’’

Thelma recorded this and all sorts of other family stories: that Capt. Tucker had William baptized, stood as his godfather and gave him his surname; that William eventually obtained his freedom (from indentured servitude, not slavery), married (possibly to a woman of mixed race) and moved to New Kent County, where he had children and owned land.

The younger Tuckers began to pay attention, especially Thelma’s cousin Wanda. Wanda remembers the older woman’s excitement: “You won’t believe what I just found!’’

Thelma’s children sometimes resented their mother’s obsession. Her husband accused her of “living in the past.’’ She’d find a way to turn any conversation around to family history and genealogy. She’d accost acquaintances at the grocery store to fill them in on what she’d discovered. When she learned your last name, she’d tell you what plantation your people lived on.

One of her daughters laughs at the memory: “Nobody liked it!’’

Undaunted, Thelma handed out a synopsis of the Tucker story at family reunions. She spoke to community groups and anyone else who’d listen, including the mailman.

Her efforts were responsible, in 1994, for the family’s official recognition in the Jamestown Settlement history park’s reenactment of the 375th anniversary of the Africans’ arrival.

A replica of that first ship, the White Lion, sailed up the James River. Some of the Tuckers, in period dress, were on board, honored as founding Americans. Thelma stood on the riverbank in a purple dashiki, beaming. 

The event cemented the Tuckers’ status as “the first family.’’ The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk described the Tuckers flatly as “the descendants of the first Africans born in North America.’’

The Tuckers became the face of 1619. A group photo of them was featured on a National Park Service brochure for visitors to the spot where the first Africans landed.

But Thelma was a paradox: She loved the Tucker story so much, she coveted it. And because she coveted it, she tried to protect it.

She’d only tell relatives parts of the story, never the whole thing. Thelma believed that the story was a book, and she was the only one to write it. She compiled a manuscript, which never got published because she wouldn’t relinquish control.

Then she died, at 64, in 2006.

Her research went to her daughters and became caught up in a family rift over real estate, divorces and other issues.

Thelma’s daughter, Shree Green, says her mother’s research could shed light on the family tree. She says that she and her sister want to publish it, but they’re not ready. The other Tuckers say they’re mystified.

This June, Wanda stood by Thelma’s simple horizontal headstone in the family cemetery. She lamented what the loss of the research meant to the family story.

“It’s like she took it with her to her grave.’’

Who lies below?

They couldn’t afford a gravestone. So sometimes, to mark a burial spot, the slaves would plant a seed. And the seed would become a tree, and the tree would grow higher, 2 feet a year.

The place where Thelma was laid to rest is dotted with oaks and pines 50 feet high. It almost certainly dates to the time of slavery. It feels like the nave of a cathedral.

The Tucker family cemetery lies seven miles from where the first Africans landed in 1619, and a mile from the site of Capt. Tucker’s plantation. It’s incongruously surrounded by squat 1950s tract houses and almost invisible from the street.

By 1896, the year the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson ratified “separate but equal,’’ Thomas Tucker and five other men paid $100 for what was known as the Old Colored Burial Ground. Tuckers probably were buried there before that, and they’ve been buried there ever since.

The Tuckers are divided about whether this resting place should be sacred ground for the dead or a place where the family can find answers about their ancestors. Some hope to see it studied as an archeological site.

But after Thelma’s death, the cemetery was neglected. Neighbors used it as a dumping ground – for a couch, a refrigerator, a water heater. Snakes crawled through the vines, and the vines crawled up the tree trunks. Kids used it to play jungle.

Then, on May 17, 2013, the Tuckers picked up their local newspaper, The Daily Press, and saw this headline: “HISTORIC CEMETERY DRAWS MAYOR'S EYE.’’

City officials said it had “languished for years under iffy ownership and infrequent maintenance.’’ The mayor said the graveyard apparently had been abandoned.

The story shocked and embarrassed Wanda, Walter and their relatives. They told the city the cemetery wasn’t abandoned. It was theirs – they had the 1896 deed. They galvanized to form the William Tucker 1624 Society and began meeting regularly to clean and prune it. 

The skull that Walter found, which was solemnly reburied in a small white coffin, was a sign the cemetery was more than it seemed. As the weeds and vines were cut back, the Tuckers found depressions that looked like unmarked graves. They hired a company to survey the graveyard with ground-penetrating radar.

The Tucker Family Cemetery has become a focal point for the family, as it was once in disrepair and overgrown. Now the William Tucker 1624 Society works to maintain the property with regular clean ups. Marion Jones of Detroit and Daisey Taylor of Newport News help at one of the family's volunteer days.

The result amazed them. The cemetery contained more than 100 unmarked graves, as many as the number of marked ones. That’s when it hit Walter: “This could be where our earliest ancestors are buried.’’

The discoveries spread the cemetery’s fame and seemed to bolster the Tuckers’ claim to history.

The Tucker 1624 Society received a $100,000 grant from an environmental nonprofit for cemetery work. The legislature approved an easement to protect the cemetery from development and ensure public access. Gov. Ralph Northam visited the cemetery last August to sign the legislation.

“Cemeteries can be a way for us to retrace our history,’’ he said.

News reports often speculated – and sometimes stated as fact – that William actually was buried there. Northam himself referred to “William Tucker’s presence here …’’

Today, the family is divided on whether to explore the cemetery’s secrets. Walter and Wanda are willing to have graves opened and the remains exhumed to discover who was buried and when. 

Walter believes that since the cemetery was used by a relatively limited number of families, there might have been burials as infrequently as once every few years. If so, he reasons, its first burials might have occurred in the 1700s or even the 1600s – William’s time.

But Tucker elders think the dead should be left in peace.

For now, Walter concedes, they have a veto. But some day, “I’ll be the elder.’’

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The Tuckers’ claim demands more research, historians say. Austin, the Hampton museum historian, sums up the Tuckers' dilemma: “We just don’t always have the information to tell the story we want to tell.’’

Their story faces a competing, if less-publicized, claim to a 1619 connection. A retired corporate executive named Shelton Tucker, also a Tidewater, Virginia, resident but not directly related to Wanda’s family, also says he’s descended from William.

There are tensions between these two Tucker clans – “a Hatfields and McCoys kind of thing,’’ says a local historian, Calvin Pearson.

Shelton Tucker resents the public focus on the other Tuckers’ claim. “The red carpet family,” he calls them. “We’re all Tuckers, but when the cameras show up, it’s always them. They’ll say anything to get in front of a camera.’’

Until someone proves otherwise, the Tuckers continue to celebrate their status as the “first family.” They’ve made the search a family affair.

 Walter’s sister, Carolita Jones-Cope, 60, handles calls from the media, which have been pouring in. She's planned a ceremony Friday at the family cemetery. Vincent Tucker, 57, leads the 1624 Society. Brandi Davis Melvin, 42, brings her three young daughters to the cemetery to spruce it up.

Brenda Tucker Doswell, 77, speaks and sings at programs celebrating her family’s story. She’s picked out a long skirt made of African fabric to wear when she sings Friday at the cemetery. “This is 400 years,” she said. “That’s what we commemorate and celebrate.”

Verrandall Tucker personifies the family’s pride in its story. He shows newspaper clippings to customers at his men’s clothing shop. He’s screened a video of a TV news report about the family’s lineage at his church.

Sometimes he changes out of his dress clothes, closes his shop and leaves a sign: “Gone to cemetery.’’

An inconvenient truth

Wanda Tucker has taken on what may be the most challenging task – the search for historical validation.

For hours last month she turned the pages of a huge ledger, squinting in the fluorescent glare at the faded cursive script, puzzling over archaic spellings. At 61, she's a practiced researcher – Ph.D., professor, department chair. But this is the search of her life.

Her family can trace its roots no further than the early 1800s; before that, the trail goes cold, leaving a 175-year gap in a genealogical chain to William.

Which is why she was poring through the 166-year-old Register of Birth at the courthouse in Isle of Wight County, Virginia.

In trying to prove one story about her family, however, she risked disproving others.

The link to William was only one story the Tuckers told about their history. They also believed that, in the long night of American slavery, they – unlike the vast majority of blacks – remained free.

Last month she was searching for birth records for Thomas Tucker, her great-great grandfather, who she thought was born about five years before the Civil War. She wanted a specific date.

The records started in 1853, so she began there, scouring the ledger for a Thomas Tucker born to a woman named Millie. But there were none – not even any Thomases. So she started over, looking simply for a Tom born to a Millie.

And suddenly, after two hours of searching, there he was on page 21 – born Oct. 20, 1856.

She’d added another leaf to the family tree.

But then her eye drifted across the page. After the columns with newborns’ names, birth dates and mothers’ names, there were three other columns: White. Colored/free. Colored/slave.

And Wanda saw that, despite all she’d been told, the column checked was the last one. Slave.

If that story was not true, what about the most important one of all?

She’s had time to think about that question, and she still believes William was her ancestor: “Until somebody proves me wrong, it is the story I am holding onto, and the one I am going to keep telling.’’

That's what makes the cemetery so important. Whether or not the Tuckers can ever prove a connection with William, it shows that they have endured slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Klan, Jim Crow and separate but equal.

“We’ve survived,’’ she says. “We’re still here.’’