The descendants of a Texan slave owner and an enslaved woman seek to claim land supposedly left to her over 150 years ago.

KHOU 11 traveled to Jacksonville and Cherokee County, Texas to learn more about the family’s mission.

JACKSONVILLE, Texas. Some distant relatives with Texan roots were amazed by the genealogical search and found out that they may have a right to land apparently left to enslaved ancestors.

This is the land that the ancestors never received.

“I took the DNA of the ancestors and found out what happened, and it was just incredible,” said Candice Hammons.

Hammons claims to be the great-great-great granddaughter of an enslaved woman named Gracie or Gracie, with whom Albarthus Arnuine, her white slave owner, had children.

Old records and a grandson’s oral history suggest that Arnuine left the Gracie hundreds of acres near present-day Jacksonville, Texas upon his death in the 1850s.

“His family and his neighbors didn’t approve of his relationship with Gracie because she actually lived in the house with him as, in fact, his mistress,” Hammons’ cousin Mary Tucker said.

Cousins ​​and others are now pushing an online petition, Hammons began trying to fulfill a will that was never made.

“These were courts and legal systems that were highly biased against African Americans, either enslaved or recently freed,” said Sam Houston State University history professor and slavery expert Nicholas Crawford, Ph.D.

Crawford said that neither intimate relations between slave owners and enslaved were unheard of, nor was the transfer of land by inheritance.

He added that some relationships in the antebellum South may have been more subtle than we tend to think.

“As this case shows, a kind of family tradition and oral transmission of the conditions of slavery and agreements between slave owners and enslaved people can be passed down through the family tree and still form the legacy of society today,” Crawford said.

Neither Hammons nor Tucker, who live in Phoenix and Los Angeles respectively, have been to Jacksonville or Cherokee County.

And, according to old maps, the land in question lies along the Neches River and is now under water thanks to the construction of Lake Jacksonville in the 1950s.

So far, family members do not have legal representation to help sort through the complex records and correct a potential error, but they are looking into it.

“Basically we want to share this and get our support from everyone, the world and government officials,” Hammons said. “We want to turn injustice into justice.”

Hammons started a Change.org petition seeking justice.

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