Hi Lyle. I have the Sisco/ Franciscos, Driggers and others from the Eastern
Shore who went to Delaware on my site:
http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/maryland.htm
(Their history in Virginia, North and South Carolina is on my site:
http://www.freeafricanamericans.com)
There is no documented evidence that they had any family connections with
the Lenape and Nanticokes of Delaware. Like most communities of mixed-race
African Americans throughout the Southeast, they refused to attend school
with the former slaves after Emancipation and formed their own schools "for
a certain class of Colored Persons" in 1881. It was only after the head of
the Jim Crow Party in Robeson County, North Carolina, created a third caste
of "Indians" (three sets of water fountains, seating areas, rest rooms,
etc.) in exchange for the votes of the former free persons of color of that
county and visits to Delaware by anthropologists that the group that
included the Harmons, Driggers, Siscos, etc. applied to the Delaware
legislature to have their name changed from "Colored Persons" to Nanticoke
Indians in 1903. It was about this time that the former free people of color
communities that owned land and had been free since the colonial period
formed "Indian" tribes in various Virginia, and North and South Carolina
counties.
It is interesting that a member of the Harmon family (free in Northampton
County in 1666) was the last convicted under the Delaware law which punished
white women for having children by "Negroes" and sold their children for 31
years. John Harmon, "free Mulatto," was charged in 1794 for having two
illegitimate children by a white woman. The case was notorious because the
defense objected to one of the witnesses against them because she was
convicted of the same offense.
Heite stated that the Norwood family of Sussex County, Delaware, were
listed as Indians in a muster. However, that muster was a 1758 muster of
Captain McClughan's Company in the French and Indian War and states that
Nathaniel Norwood was a planter from INDIAN River Hundred, Sussex County.
His brother Daniel was listed as a farmer from Angola Hundred the same year.
(See Montgomery's Pennsylvania Archives, Fifth Series, pp. 142-3].
Paul
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