About This Project

Sometime around 1815, in a part of Alabama that had only recently been seized from the Creek Nation, a boy named Charles was born into slavery. He would never choose his own surname. The name "King" was assigned to him, likely by the man who owned him. His wife Julia, born around 1820, also in Alabama, also enslaved, also received a name she did not choose. They would spend the first five decades of their lives as property on someone else's ledger.

At some point before the Civil War, the family was moved from Alabama to South Carolina, and then to Florida. Whether they were sold, relocated with a planter, or marched in a coffle, the records do not say. Their son James was born enslaved in South Carolina around 1843. His wife Ellen, also born enslaved in South Carolina around 1853, joined the family. By the end of the war, they had all settled in Marion County, Florida, near a place called Camp Izard.

The 1870 Census is where the Kings enter the historical record as people rather than property. Charles, age 55, is listed as head of his own household for the first time in his life. Down the road at Camp Izard, his son James, age 27, heads his own household with wife Ellen, age 19. These are the first documents in which any member of this family appears by name. Everything before 1870 is silence.

James King became a farmer in Ocala. The 1880 Census records him working his own land with his son Samuel, listed as "Sam'l Z. King," age 12. Samuel Zachariah King would marry Martha Johnson in 1893 and raise a family of his own. He would outlive everyone in his generation, dying on Christmas Eve 1968 at approximately one hundred years of age. Samuel was born three years after the Emancipation Proclamation and lived long enough to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act. His life spanned the entire arc from Reconstruction to the modern era.

Samuel and Martha's son Ebo, known as "Buster," was born in Kendrick, Florida in 1895. He grew up in Jim Crow Florida, where the law and the local economy were designed to extract the maximum labor from Black families while preventing them from accumulating wealth. Buster worked as a laborer. He lived at 1930 N.W. 2nd Avenue in Ocala for most of his life. He fathered children with at least two partners: Freddie with Mamie Lawton, and Theola, Bernice, and likely others with Lizzie Finley. He died in 1985 at age 89, buried at Pinelawn Cemetery, Lot 130, Section Holy Bible A, Grave C. His funeral record at Cunningham Funeral Home lists his father as "Jack King" and his mother as Martha Johnson, though the survivor list is incomplete: confirmed children Freddie and Theola are missing from it.

Among the children probably born to Buster and Lizzie was Gloria A. King, born October 9, 1936 in Ocala. "Probably" because no single primary document yet confirms the relationship. Gloria shares the county, the surname, the race, and the timeframe. Her probable brother Eddie, born 1935, shares the same pattern of absence from the 1940 Census. SP4 Lewis King, born in 1945, whose relationship to this family remains unconfirmed, was killed in action in Vietnam on August 24, 1968, serving with the 1st Platoon, A Troop, 3/4 Cavalry, 25th Infantry Division. He was 23 years old. His name is inscribed on Panel W46, Line 4 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. Two months later, Lizzie Finley died. Four months after that, Samuel Z. King died. Lewis’s individual casualty and burial file is being sought to clarify his circumstances and next-of-kin information; see the research update.

Gloria would eventually leave Florida. She moved to Miramar, then briefly to New Jersey, and settled in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where she lives today at age 89. She married at least once, using the surnames Brown and Kelly at different points. At some stage she lived in the Cortland, New York area, where she raised her son Clarence.

Clarence Jr.’s death certificate names his father as Clarence D. Sanders Sr., but his father’s specific identity remains unresolved. New Westfield records identify a Chicago Clarence Sanders who married Lucile Johnson in Bessemer in 1953, with parents indexed as John Sanders and Roxie Lee Hutcherson. A Chicago family obituary names a Clarence Jr. with spouse Cheryl; Barklee’s father was married to Catherine. These records must be reconciled before the Westfield family can be added to the proven direct ancestry. See the source review.

Barklee’s father, Clarence D. Sanders Jr., was born in Ocala, Florida on June 11, 1952. He followed the Great Migration pattern from Florida to New York, settling in the Cortland and Virgil area. He studied political science at SUNY Cortland. He was present at Woodstock in 1969. He worked two Olympic Games. He built things for a living, doing construction with Paul Yaman Construction and JBK Builders. He married Catherine, a woman who had been adopted and raised as Catherine Mary Sullivan, and whose biological maternal line DNA has since identified as the French-Canadian Laliberté family (indexed as "Liberty" in New York records) of Clinton County, New York and Québec — her exact biological parents still to be confirmed. Together they had Barklee, and Clarence had nine other children: Amber, Heather, Layla, Blaze, Phoenix, Montana, Shaq, Alsace, and Holiday. He enjoyed skiing, golfing, and fishing. He died on December 27, 2025, at age 73, in the Cortland area. His sister Mildred and his stepfather David survived him.

Barklee Unitas-Ali Sanders was born on January 19, 1994 in Cortland, New York. He enlisted in the United States Army and served as a Signal Support Systems Specialist from 2014 to 2020. He deployed and served in the same military that had, 150 years earlier, fought a war to determine whether his ancestors would remain property. After his service, he entered the technology industry in San Francisco, working as a systems engineer. He built AiVAClaims, an AI-powered platform to help other veterans navigate the disability claims process. He has traveled to 29 countries, including returning to the African continent: Togo, Ethiopia, South Africa.

At age 31, Barklee Sanders holds a six-figure retirement portfolio, a pension, and receives lifetime VA compensation at the highest compensation. He is the first person in his documented family line, going back to a man born enslaved in Alabama in 1815, to have a retirement account. He is the first to have a pension. He is the first to have guaranteed lifetime income. He is the first to hold a professional-class career.

The family went from being property to owning property in seven generations, with every system in America working against that outcome.