Tom Duckenfield was born in 1964 at historic Freedmen’s Hospital, established a century earlier in Washington, DC by the Medical Division of the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide care to former enslaved persons freed following the Civil War. His maternal and paternal roots are firmly entrenched in the Commonwealth of Virginia, including Westmoreland County, Richmond County, Northumberland County, Caroline County, Hanover County, Greensville County, and Richmond City. Through his mother, Evelyn Newman Duckenfield, he is both a double-descendant of the Thompson and Newman families of Westmoreland County, manumitted in 1791 by Councillor Robert Carter III’s Deed of Gift, as well as a descendant of James McCoy, a Westmoreland County Free Black Patriot of the American Revolutionary War. Through his late father, Thomas A. Duckenfield, Sr., he is a descendant of Free Black indentured servant Penelope Pugh (b. 1748, Bertie, NC) and Sir Nathaniel Duckenfield, Jr. (b. 1746, Cheshire, England), a British Loyalist during the American Revolutionary War and 5th Baron of Dukinfield, England.

Tom is the CEO of TDB Communications, Inc. Previously, he was a partner in several law firms in the areas of corporate finance, commercial transactions, renewable energy, government contracts, and international trade. He served in the U.S. Army as an infantry lieutenant, captain in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, and Assistant to the Army General Counsel in the Pentagon. Tom attended St. Patrick’s Episcopal Day School in Washington, DC from 1971 to 1973; graduated in 1982 cum laude from St. Albans School in Washington, DC; received an A.B degree in History, cum laude, from Princeton University in 1986; a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1989; and received an England & Wales Solicitor Qualification through the Oxford Institute for Legal Studies in 2011.