Nancy Lee Sears was a formerly enslaved woman whose life spanned from the antebellum South into the twentieth century, bearing witness to slavery, emancipation, and the long, uneven struggle for freedom in the United States. She died in 1938 at the age of 102 while living in Englewood, New Jersey.

She was born into slavery in Columbia, Virginia, on a plantation owned by Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Nancy spent the first twenty-one years of her life enslaved and married another enslaved person, Woodson Sears, when she was nineteen. Although the Emancipation Proclamation legally ended slavery during the Civil War, freedom initially brought little immediate change to her daily life, reflecting the broader realities faced by many formerly enslaved people in the South.

After several years moving within Virginia, Nancy migrated north around the age of forty as part of a wider post-Reconstruction movement of Black families seeking greater security and opportunity. She eventually settled in Englewood, where she lived for the final twenty-eight years of her life and became part of the city’s growing African American community.

Nancy Lee Sears raised a large family whose roots extended across New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Among her daughters was Elizabeth Sears Hinton, who married Charles Hinton and later lived to the age of 104. Elizabeth became a charter member of Shiloh AME Zion Church in Englewood and was the mother of Theodore H. Hinton, who would go on to become Englewood’s first city prosecutor. Through these generations, Nancy’s lineage directly connected the lived experience of slavery to twentieth-century Black civic, religious, and professional life in northern New Jersey.

Funeral services for Nancy Lee Sears were held at the First Baptist Church of Englewood, and she was buried in Brookside Cemetery. Her life stands as a powerful reminder that the history of slavery is not distant—it lived on in Englewood through people who carried its memory forward in their own bodies and families.

"Former Slave Dead In Englewood At 102." New York Times, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, 17 Nov. 1938, p.25.