{"id":31064,"date":"2013-05-14T04:39:31","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T04:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=31064"},"modified":"2013-08-16T02:06:45","modified_gmt":"2013-08-16T02:06:45","slug":"in-new-book-two-kentucky-families-discover-surprising-racial-histories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=31064","title":{"rendered":"In new book, two Kentucky families discover surprising racial histories"},"content":{"rendered":"

In new book, two Kentucky families discover surprising racial histories<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lexington Herald-Leader<\/a>
\nLexington, Kentucky
\n2011-05-15<\/p>\n

Linda B. Blackford<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Freda Spencer Goble of Paintsville<\/a> knew that she hailed from a proud and hardworking clan that carved a life out of the hills and hollows of frontier Johnson County. What she didn’t know was that one of those frontiersmen, her great-great grandfather, was partly black.<\/p>\n

William LaBach is a Georgetown<\/a> lawyer and genealogist who has long studied his Gibson relatives, a clan of Louisiana sugar planters who made a second home in Lexington before the Civil War. He’d heard that a colonial forebear was part African, but could never confirm it.<\/p>\n

These two Kentucky families are now the subject of a new book by Vanderbilt University law professor Daniel Sharfstein<\/a>. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White<\/a><\/em> reveals the complex and shifting history of race in America, a history about people’s most basic \u2014 and yet most unreliable \u2014 assumptions about their own identity…<\/p>\n

…Thanks to books like Slaves in the Family<\/a><\/em> by Edward Ball<\/a> and revelations about President Thomas Jefferson’s<\/a> black descendants, people have become more used to the idea that family trees branch with different ethnicities. However, the idea they might be a different ethnicity themselves is a new idea that is only recently emerging in genealogy and other historical studies.<\/p>\n

“This is a more unsettling story. … The story really changes the way people approach race,” Sharfstein said. “For a lot of the descendants I spoke with, being white meant they really didn’t have to think about race for most of their lives. But now they’re really paying attention.”…<\/p>\n

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

In new book, two Kentucky families discover surprising racial histories Lexington Herald-Leader Lexington, Kentucky 2011-05-15 Linda B. Blackford Freda Spencer Goble of Paintsville knew that she hailed from a proud and hardworking clan that carved a life out of the hills and hollows of frontier Johnson County. What she didn’t know was that one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,1467,8,6462,6940,10],"tags":[2766,2767,14687,495,14683,14684,14685,14686],"class_list":["post-31064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-slavery","category-uk","tag-daniel-j-sharfstein","tag-daniel-sharfstein","tag-freda-spencer-goble","tag-kentucky","tag-lexington-herald-leader","tag-linda-b-blackford","tag-linda-blackford","tag-william-labach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31064","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=31064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}