Mingo is not among those highlighted in “ Set at Liberty,” but the society has identified at least 100 enslaved people and more than 200 local ships involved in the slave trade as part of its ongoing work.

It’s a “common myth” that slavery either never existed or was inherently different in New England than other places, says Beth Bower, a local historian on the board of Historic Beverly.

Historical records show New Englanders clearly imported enslaved Africans for all the tasks that made the young colony possible, from farming and fishing to building ships, she said.

And while history credits Massachusetts with being among the first states to abolish slavery in 1783, there is growing evidence that slavery persisted in the state into the early 1800s before gradually disappearing, Bower said.

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but it took more than two years for Black slaves in Galveston, Texas to receive word of their freedom. That day, June 19, 1865, is now known as Juneteenth, which is being celebrated as an official federal holiday for the first time Sunday.

Matelski said she first heard of Mingo’s tale in the summer of 2020, during the height of the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

A Michigan native, she said she was immediately struck by the story’s potential to speak to the present as the nation reckons with its racist past.

Mingo’s tale is all the more significant considering he was married to a free Indigenous woman, and his enslaver descended from the original founders of Beverly, Matelski said.

“It’s so deeply rooted in Beverly history and in the New England experience,” she said. “There’s just a lot of different threads happening there.”

Part of Matelski’s focus going forward will be separating myth from fact.

In the most popular telling, for example, Mingo achieves his feat and earns his emancipation, only to die later that year.

But local records suggest the real-life Mingo lived into his 80s, was baptized, raised a daughter and even acquired land in town before dying in 1748.