{"id":24555,"date":"2012-07-30T23:47:37","date_gmt":"2012-07-30T23:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24555"},"modified":"2012-07-31T02:34:51","modified_gmt":"2012-07-31T02:34:51","slug":"obama-has-ties-to-slavery-not-by-his-father-but-his-mother-research-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24555","title":{"rendered":"Obama Has Ties to Slavery Not by His Father but His Mother, Research Suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama Has Ties to Slavery Not by His Father but His Mother, Research Suggests<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2012-07-30<\/p>\n

Sheryl Gay Stolberg<\/a><\/strong>, Washington Correspondent<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 President Obama\u2019s<\/a> biography \u2014 son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas \u2014 has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.<\/p>\n

Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking, saying that Mr. Obama\u2019s mother<\/a> had, in addition to her European ancestors, at least one African forebear and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The findings are scheduled to be announced on Monday by Ancestry.com<\/a>, a genealogy company based in Provo, Utah. Its team, while lacking definitive proof, said it had evidence that \u201cstrongly suggests\u201d Mr. Obama\u2019s family tree \u2014 on his mother\u2019s side \u2014 stretches back nearly four centuries to a slave in colonial Virginia named John Punch…<\/p>\n

…The findings come as more and more Americans are discovering their own mixed-race heritage. Elizabeth Shown Mills<\/a>, a former president of the American Society of Genealogists, said the Internet, coupled with the ease of DNA testing and heightened interest among both amateur and professional genealogists, was helping to reveal the extent of racial intermingling over the centuries…<\/p>\n

…The Ancestry.com team used DNA analysis to make the connection, and it also combed through marriage and property records to trace Mr. Obama\u2019s maternal ancestry to the time and place where Mr. Punch lived. The company said records suggested that Mr. Punch fathered children with a white woman, who passed her free status on to those children, giving rise to a family of a slightly different name, the Bunches, that ultimately spawned Mr. Obama\u2019s mother, <\/strong>Stanley Ann Dunham<\/strong><\/a>…<\/p>\n

…The Ancestry.com team spent two years examining Mr. Obama\u2019s mother\u2019s past, focusing on the mixed-race Bunch line. The researchers said that over time, as the Bunches continued to intermarry, they became prominent landowners in colonial Virginia and were known as white.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe sort of stumbled across it,\u201d said Anastasia Harman, the lead researcher. \u201cWe were just doing general research into the president\u2019s family tree, and as we started digging back in time, we realized that the Bunch family were African-American.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is no evidence that Ms. Dunham had any inkling that she might have had African-American ancestry, said Janny Scott, her biographer. By the mid-1800s, according to a 2007 article in The Chicago Sun-Times<\/em>, one of Ms. Dunham\u2019s Bunch ancestors had a son who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Ancestry.com group traced two major Bunch family branches, one that lived as white and stayed in Virginia for generations and another that left for the Carolinas. In North Carolina, the Bunches were recorded as \u201cmulatto<\/a>\u201d in early records, and their descendants are also the president\u2019s cousins…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Obama Has Ties to Slavery Not by His Father but His Mother, Research Suggests The New York Times 2012-07-30 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Washington Correspondent WASHINGTON \u2014 President Obama\u2019s biography \u2014 son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas \u2014 has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,459,6,6940,20,693],"tags":[11437,11431,8042,10122,8662,2640,11430,8663,2327],"class_list":["post-24555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-history","category-new-media","category-slavery","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-anastasia-harman","tag-ancestry-com","tag-ann-dunham","tag-ira-berlin","tag-janny-scott","tag-new-york-times","tag-sheryl-gay-stolberg","tag-stanley-ann-dunham","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}