Virginia's first muster, or census, was compiled in March 1620. It listed the "colony's thirty-two Africans: fifteen male and seventeen female. They, along with four Indians, were categorized as "Others not Christians in the Service of the English." Because we have no record of any other Africans were arriving in the colony between September 1619 and March 1620, it is possible that all thirty-two could have arrived on the Treasurer and the White Lion. Following this line of thought, if one deducts the two or three Africans that were left by the Treasurer from the thirty-two recorded in the census, then the "20. and odd" Africans exchanged for provisions by the captain of the White Lion might have numbered closer to twenty-nine or thirty. If any births or deaths occurred among the African population between their arrival in 1619 and the March 1620 census, they were not recorded.

Although it is uncertain where the Africans lived, some probably resided at Jamestown in the households of Sir George Yeardley and Captain William Peirce and at Flowerdew Hundred in the household of cape-merchant Abraham Peirsey, all of whom later were identified in the 1624 and 1635 musters as having black servants. (The use of the word servant reflects the fact that when the first Africans came to Virginia in 1619, English and Virginia law had not yet enshrined the practice of race-based slavery .)

By 1624, when the next muster was compiled, Virginia's African population had dropped to twenty-one. Some of the Africans probably had succumbed to the so-called seasoning process, whereby summertime diseases killed a majority of new residents during the colony's first few decades. For this reason, Virginia leaders periodically requested that ships carrying new workers arrive during the winter months, as opposed to August, when the White Lion landed. Research by Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman suggests that some may have been carrying a blood parasite that transmits malaria, while their close contact with the European slave traders likely exposed them to other infectious diseases. They would have been susceptible to the various agues and fevers common to the Chesapeake Bay region, and probably suffered through the unfamiliar winter cold. And those Africans who did not die of disease may have died after being placed in vulnerable positions in fights against Virginia Indians. In particular, this may have been the case on March 22, 1622, when Virginia Indians led by Opechancanough attacked European settlements, killing as many as a quarter of the colony's inhabitants.

Some of the twenty-one Africans listed in the 1624 muster had European names. Four of the eleven Africans living at Flowerdew Hundred were identified by name: Anthony, William, John, and another Anthony. Three Africans resided at Jamestown, but only one was listed by name: a woman named Angelo (sometimes Angela), purchased by William Peirce. An African named Edward lived in the Neck O'Land, the mainland behind Jamestown, and was part of the household headed by Richard Kingsmill , guardian of the late Reverend Richard Bucke's children. Peter, Antonio, Frances, and Margaret resided on the lower side of the James River at Edward Bennett 's plantation near the former Indian town of Warraskoyack, while Anthony and Isabella were members of Captain William Tucker 's household in Elizabeth City , formerly Kecoughtan. (Tucker was the brother of Daniel Tucker, governor of the Bermuda colony from 1616 to 1619, and probably was aware of how landowners could benefit from African labor.) One African was listed among the dead at West and Shirley Hundred , in the corporation of Charles City .

The 1625 muster listed twenty-three Africans and a single Indian, all identified as "servants," who resided on plantations scattered from the mouth of the James to Flowerdew Hundred. They probably lived in houses separate from their European masters. And while the 1625 muster included, for most Europeans, the years in which they arrived and the ships on which they came, little such information was provided for Africans. Three male and five female Africans lived in Yeardley's household at Jamestown; at Flowerdew Hundred, there were four African men, two women, and a child. An African man named John Pedro lived in the household of Francis West , of Elizabeth City, and the same Edward from 1624 still lived with Richard Kingsmill at Neck O'Land. Angelo was still living in Captain Peirce's household. By 1625, Captain Tucker's Anthony and Isabella, in Elizabeth City, had produced a son, William; all three had been baptized, as had an Indian living in the household. William is the first named child of African descent in Virginia.

Among the Africans owned by the Bennett family in 1625 was Antonio (also listed in 1624), who had arrived on the James in 1621. In March 1622, he was one of just a handful of people who managed to survive Opechancanough's attack on the plantation, and he eventually gained his freedom. At some point, Antonio wed a woman named Mary, who had come to Virginia in 1622 on the Margaret and John, and the two lived as Anthony and Mary Johnson in Northampton County on the Eastern Shore . There, they raised four children and by the 1650s owned 250 acres of land. Their two sons owned adjoining farms of 450 and 100 acres each before the whole family moved to Maryland, in the 1660s. Anthony Johnson's grandson, John Johnson Jr., purchased a 44-acre farm there in 1677 and named it Angola.

Other Africans began to turn up in Virginia court records. On September 19, 1625, for instance, the General Court ordered Captain Nathaniel Bass to provide clothing for an African man named Brass (or Brase), who had come to Virginia with a Captain Jones and been sold to Captain Bass. The same decision awarded temporary custody of Brass to Lady Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley , the wife of Sir George Yeardley and a resident of Jamestown, who was then ordered to pay forty pounds of good tobacco per month for his labor "so long as he remayneth with her." On October 3, the court ruled again, this time transferring Brass to the custody of Governor Francis Wyatt and voiding the original sale Captain Jones had made to Captain Bass.

The African population in Virginia increased dramatically when, in 1628, the ship Fortune, out of Massachusetts Bay, captured a Portuguese slaver carrying about 100 Angolans, whom the captain sold in Virginia for tobacco. A muster planned for 1629 either did not take place or the records did not survive.