{"id":24573,"date":"2012-07-31T18:35:47","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T18:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24573"},"modified":"2017-01-25T21:25:44","modified_gmt":"2017-01-25T21:25:44","slug":"obama%e2%80%99s-purported-link-to-early-american-slave-is-latest-twist-in-family-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24573","title":{"rendered":"Obama\u2019s purported link to early American slave is latest twist in family tree"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama\u2019s purported link to early American slave is latest twist in family tree<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2012-07-30<\/p>\n

Krissah Thompson<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

President Obama\u2019s<\/a> extraordinary family story gained a new layer this week as a team of genealogists found evidence that he is most likely a descendant of one of the first documented African slaves in this country.<\/p>\n

The link to slavery, which scholars of genealogy and race in the United States called remarkable, was found to have existed approximately 400 years back in the lineage of Obama\u2019s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham<\/a>. It was discovered by a team of four genealogists from Ancestry.com<\/a> whose findings from two years of work were released in a report Monday.<\/p>\n

Using property and tax records, the team uncovered \u201ca lot of context and circumstantial evidence\u201d that points to an enslaved black man named John Punch being Obama\u2019s ancestor, said Joseph Shumway, one of the genealogists who worked on the report…<\/p>\n

…Interest in the family trees of Obama and his wife has served to upend assumptions, said Sheryll Cashin<\/a>, a Georgetown University law professor who documented her research into her own family history in the book \u201cThe Agitator\u2019s Daughter<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely poetic,\u201d Cashin said of the discovery. \u201cRace mixing was here from the beginning.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The discovery comes at a time when Americans of all backgrounds have been digging deeper into their family trees. It was such familial research that led the team at Ancestry to make the connection between Punch and Obama\u2019s family line.<\/p>\n

They first traced Obama\u2019s mother\u2019s heritage through her maternal grandmother to the Bunch family, who at one time lived in Virginia, where they \u201c<\/strong>passed<\/strong><\/a> for white\u201d and \u201cintermarried with local white families,\u201d<\/strong> according to the report. Members of the modern Bunch family, who had already begun to dig into their heritage, conducted DNA testing that found that the family had an ancestor from Africa, and they posted that information on a family Web site. Shumway and his colleagues set out to find that black ancestor…<\/p>\n

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

Obama\u2019s purported link to early American slave is latest twist in family tree The Washington Post 2012-07-30 Krissah Thompson President Obama\u2019s extraordinary family story gained a new layer this week as a team of genealogists found evidence that he is most likely a descendant of one of the first documented African slaves in this country. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,459,8,20,693],"tags":[11431,8042,11436,11441,11440,11439,8663,2875,2581],"class_list":["post-24573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-ancestry-com","tag-ann-dunham","tag-john-punch","tag-joseph-shumway","tag-krissah-thompson","tag-sheryll-cashin","tag-stanley-ann-dunham","tag-the-washington-post","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24573","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=24573"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51290,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24573\/revisions\/51290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}