Born in 1757, Tom Hyde was enslaved by John Hyde of Fairfield, Connecticut until 1778.
Born in 1774, Sukey was a child of mixed heritage who was orphaned by 1783; described as "freeborn," which means she was not enslaved.
The first two Black Loyalists to arrive in what is now New Brunswick were nine-year-old Sukey and 27-year-old Tom Hyde, both of whom were servants in the household of Polly and Fyler Dibblee.
Two years after the outbreak of the American Revolution, Tom escaped from his Patriot master, John Hyde. After serving with the king's forces for five years, Tom received a General Birch Certificate that declared him a free man in the eyes of the British government. Sometime in the early spring of 1783, Tom met Fyler Dibblee, a Connecticut lawyer, who had suffered extreme hardship at the hands of the American Patriots for his Loyalist sympathies. Hyde hired himself out to Dibblee, under terms that remain obscure. He departed with the Dibblee family from New York, on 16 April 1783, on the Union, the flagship of the first fleet to take Loyalists to the mouth of the St. John River.
Sukey also met the Dibblee family before their departure in the Spring Fleet. She became their indentured servant, a legal arrangement into which only free persons could enter. Since Polly Dibblee had to look after six children — the youngest of whom was not yet four — Sukey was no doubt employed for both child care and household work.
Although the early months in Parrtown (the future Saint John) were happy ones for the Dibblees, Fyler fell into debt and suffered a severe depression. In May 1784 he committed suicide. A few weeks later, the family's home was destroyed by a fire that swept through Parrtown. When Dibblee's widow, Polly, and her children moved to Kingston, New Brunswick, later that year, there is no mention of African servants accompanying them. Tom Hyde and Sukey were probably dismissed sometime in the summer of 1784 because Polly could not afford to keep them. Their fate is unknown.