Black settler: A search continues for a Plymouth pilgrim who may have been African American.

Was one of the Plymouth Colony settlers a black man?

The search for a black Pilgrim began decades ago. Then, in 1981, historians announced with great fanfare that they had finally found enough evidence that one early settler was indeed an African American.

That man was included in a 1643 record listing the names of men able to serve in the Plymouth, Mass., militia. He was identified as “Abraham Pearse, blackamore.”

In those days, a blackamore, a derivative of “black Moor,” was a term used to describe someone with dark skin. Black Moors had roots in North Africa and often worked as servants or enslaved people in Europe.

Records indicated Abraham Pearse was not enslaved; he voted and owned land, having arrived in Plymouth in 1623,

But the excitement didn’t last. A DNA analysis raised doubts that Pearse was African.

That pushed researchers back to square one in looking for a black Pilgrim.

Eugene Aubrey Stratton, a former historian general of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, made the case that the blackamore listed in the 1643 militia document could have been a man named Hercules.

As for the black Pilgrim, the search continues for the name of the man listed in the 1643 record as a blackamore, said Richard Pickering, deputy executive director of Plimoth Plantation, a living history museum in Plymouth dedicated to the Pilgrims who landed there in 1620.