Carefully raking dirt in the scorching heat at an archeological site in historic Jamestown, Chard Reed works hard to reconstruct the life of Angela, who arrived there from Africa 400 years ago.
After the arduous crossing of the Atlantic, Angela is one of the first African slaves known to have reached the first permanent English settlement in North America.
"I see a lot of connections from my family's history to what started here in 1619," says the 32-year-old archaeologist from Virginia, who is herself black.
He calls the first slaves who arrived in today's USA "the foremothers and forefathers, not only of African-American but of American culture in general."
She says that there are white servants and black slaves in her family tree as well.
As he carefully works, bricks begin to emerge from the ground, the remains of more modern buildings later erected on the site of the property in Jamestown where Angela once lived, Hina agency reports.
The green landscape was probably not much different from the one African slaves saw upon their arrival in August 1619
At that time, Portuguese and Spanish slave traders had already been selling Africans as labor in South America, for example in Brazil, for decades.
Originally from the kingdom of Ndongo, present-day Angola, Angela was put aboard a Portuguese ship in Luanda, which sailed for Veracruz, a Spanish colony in present-day Mexico.
Almost a third of the 350 slaves died before the ships crossed the Atlantic due to the terrible conditions of transport.
The first of the two ships, the "White Lion," arrived in Virginia in the latter part of August 1619, wrote John Rolfe, a wealthy English settler who was the husband of Pocahontas, whose father was a powerful American chief.
The second ship arrived at Point Comfort, today's Fort Monroe near Jamestown, not long after, reports Hina's AFP writing.
The only woman whose name has been preserved for history is Angela, "the first documented African woman in Virginia," says Bly Straube, a curator at the Jamestown museum.
"For me, it's like the story of Eve," she added.
"She and the other African women who arrived in 1619 are the generation of what will become our African-American community. It's the beginning."
According to Hina, it is also the beginning of a dark part of American history, 250 years of slavery and a long period of racial segregation after that.
The consequences are still being felt in American society today.
African slaves arrived in Virginia shortly after settlers elected the first local legislature on September 30. Historian James Horne calls it a historical paradox.
Just a few weeks after "our first democratic experiment", people arrive who "have had all their rights revoked, even that of identity".
Terry Brown, superintendent of Fort Monroe National Monument, says the history of slavery in the US is "the greatest story of survival in American history."
Brown, who learned through DNA testing that his ancestors came from Cameroon, says he gets "very emotional" when he thinks about the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia, including Angela.
"That was 400 years ago. Who would have ever thought that I would be standing here on their shoulders?".
In the early 1620s, there were about thirty Africans in Virginia, records show.
Angela's name appears in the census of 1624 and 1625. Some historians doubt that it was her real name, but that it was probably given to her by the Portuguese.
But everyone agrees that she was a slave in the wealthy Pierce family. She probably worked in the house and orchard, according to Straube.
She also probably lived with white servants. Namely, it was only 40 years after Angela's arrival, around 1660, that several English colonies in North America declared that slavery was transmitted through the mother.
Interracial marriages were prohibited, which was in effect in some countries well into the 20th century.
After 1625, Angela disappears from the almanac, but her name is in the limelight in Jamestown today.
"Researching the first Africans gives us a fuller view of a part of American history that we have not yet come to terms with," Reid said.
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