President Obama descended from the first slave in the US.. on his mother's side?

[Coexist]

via TPM

Ancestry.com is out with a press release and a study this morning claiming that President Obama is descended from what they call the first ‘slave’ in America. “President Barack Obama,” says the press release, “is the 11th great-grandson of John Punch, the first documented African enslaved for life in American history.” And the kicker is, at least as far as this study goes, that it’s through his white mother.

There are a lot of contingent claims in the study, done by Ancestry.com genealogist Joseph Shumway. The first is that an African man named John Punch became the first slave in 1640 — more on that in a moment.

Obama’s mother Stanley Ann Dunham was descended from slave-owning Virginians and Shumway’s argument is that Punch had children with a white woman who inherited her free status and eventually ‘passed’ into the white population. He is thus the ancestor of the Dunhams. That’s certainly not inherently implausible. There’s a lot of African blood among Southern whites. Much more common was white men and black women, though in these very early decades race hierarchies weren’t quite so nailed down.

What are the odds?

[dipsydoodle]

1. What are the odds?

Nil.

[Skinner]

2. If you think about it...

If President Obama has an ancestor who was an American slave it is more likely that that person would be on his mother's side.

Still very interesting.

[RC]

3. Obama's mother was Irish.

So how does that fit?

[CJCRANE]

5. Um...she was American

with English, Irish and various other European roots.

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. Not really?

She had an Irish ancestor. Which is not the same thing as being Irish. Most of her American ancestry goes back to the 1600's and immigrants from Britain and a few other places. (Obama is my tenth cousin; we're both descended from a 17th century French Huguenot named Marin Duval who came to Maryland.)

[Coexist]

7. thats really cool

I'm not related to anyone interesting, per the relatives who researched the ancestry on my dad's side.

[vaberella]

9. Wasn't she more German than Irish?

But in any event she was an American and during the early days there was a lot of intermixing between people's and races...more so than now a days. Proximity and all that.

[Spider Jerusalem]

11. Nope

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=AHN&db=haruspex&id=I008864

More English than anything, in terms of ancestry, she only has one set of 3rd great-grandparents with German surnames.

[HooptieWagon]

14. The British blood connection can be a fooler, though...

since England has had so many immigrants and invaders.
My mothers side was easy to trace since they came from a long line of nobles and landowners dating back to the 1086 Domesday Book. Then, to my surprise the 1086 ancestor wasn't a Norman, but a Breton from a long line of Kings and Dukes of Brittany, which originated with a Saxon immigrant to Brittany early in the fourth century AD.

[Spider Jerusalem]

16. That far back, though...

anyone of European ancestry is probably descended from close to everyone then living who left descendants to the present day. The number of one's ancestors increases by a power of two with every generation; at forty generations one has 2^40, or 1,099,511,627,776, potential ancestors. That's many times greater than the total number of people who have ever lived (and the population of England at the time was something like three million). Given that populations moved somewhat less in those days one is very probably descended many times over from the same few groups of people through multiple lines of descent; I saw somewhere that it's been estimated that no two people of specifically British ancestry are more distantly related than 20th cousin or so, and any two people of European ancestry probably share a common ancestor within thirty to forty generations.

[HooptieWagon]

22. So very true.

Since most of Europe was settled by the Germanic tribes; Saxons, Franks, Lombardians, Burgundians, etc, anyone of European descent has a high likelyhood of common ancestry with another.

[nadinbrzezinski]

19. Indentured servant from Irish descent most likely

the Carolinas had a lot of Irish indentured servants.

The early colonial period is particularly fascinating. That said, the odds of this are pretty low, in my view.

[jp11]

4. Ancestry.com a reason to waste money on some historical data about people you hardly

know anything about but are related to because you are the product of their children having children and so on.

One could just make up a bunch of crap about their heritage and save themselves the money of paying ancestry.com but that would be too hard.

[William769]

8. Some people have a sense of history and take pride in where they come from.

I come from a very large family tree and have met several distant relatives on this website. Here is a snipit of what I have accomplished.

"Wood King, son of Gahickdodon and Nancy King, was born 1751 in Virginia. He married Hexy Childress in North Carolina. She was born there.Woodward P. King was born 1802 in North Carolina, died 1867 in Harlan County, Kentucky. He married Elizabeth Capps whom was born 1807 and died 1875 in Harlan County, KY. Woodward and Elizabeth’s children were:
1. Orpha R. “Offie” b. 1826 NC; d. bef. 1920; m. Elizabeth Blevins
2. Alva Burdine b. 1827 NC; d. 1866; m. Rhoda Hensley
3. R.S.C. Butler b. 1835 NC; m. Margaret Caudill
4. Chockley C. b. 1838 NC; m. 1Martha Jane Astrop; m. 2 Kessiah Brewer5. Emily Jane b. 1841 NC; m. Albert Stewart
6. Thomas Jefferson b. 1843 NC; m. Anna Bailey
7. Elizabeth b. 1845 KY; m. Robert Napier
Alva Burdine “Bird” King, was born in March of 1827 in Wayne County, North Carolina. He died 24 December 1866 in Harlan County, Kentucky. He was buried at the Old Burkhardt Cemetery at Jones Creek in Harlan County. He married Rhoda Hensley born 11 May 1831 in Harlan Co.; she is also buried at the Old Burkhardt Cemetery. Alva and Rhoda’s children were:
1. Samuel b. 15 May 1850; m. Mary Ann Setser; d. aft. 1930 Owsley Co.,KY
2. Woodward P. b. 1853; m. Elizabeth Harris
3. William b. 1856
4. John H. b. 1857
5. Ewell Van b. 1859
6. Felix b. 1860
7. Garrett b. 1862
8. Elizabeth b. 1864
9. Alva B. Jr. b. 1866".

Felix King is my Grandfather, Alva Burdine “Bird” King is my Greatgrandfather, Woodard P. King is my Great great grandfater, Wood King is my Great great great grandfather. I have verified all this information through tax, marriage, and deed records through the Harlan County Public library and court house in Kentucky, and the Wayne county Court house in N.C.

I just now need to connect Gahickdodon to wood King which I am working on now."

Time and money well spent.

[vaberella]

10. Some of us have no chance of that just because we're descedants of slaves.

As an Haitian person my family only went as far as my great great grandma and that's about it.

[William769]

12. Understandable.

My mother was born in Germany & my Grandparents (her parents) fled Germany when Hitler came to power. It's seems my mothers family History has been wiped off the face of the earth, but thats still not stopping me from trying.

[HooptieWagon]

23. That does make it more difficult.

You may not be able to identify specific named ancestors, but a DNA test would likely identify ancestry of a region or tribe. You might start with the area around Mali and Gambia, and see if you have common DNA.

[vaberella]

24. Well I plan on taking two tests in future.

One is called 23andme.com that checks my racial percentage. Which is just for entertainment purposes. And there is another one called Africanancestry.com which pinpoints where in Africa my line comes from. So I plan on at least doing that since I can't really claim any ascendants. On my dad's side he's both of African and European---it would seem Scottish. But I find it weird the Scottish made it as far down as Haiti. And mum is the larger mixture since her family dates back to the Haitian Revolution and beyond. She even knew her great grandmother.

[Retrograde]

13. Especially since ancestry.com has sole control over certain databases

My library has access to it: if you need to look someone up in a published census and know exactly who you're looking for it's ok. As with any research, the results are only as good as the data behind them.

I find it interesting that ancestry.com is announcing this, considering as they were founded to help the LDS with their geneological research. There can't possibly be any ulterior motives to saying see, Obama's not 100% white on his mother's side either, like we previously thought. No, it must just be me getting paranoid in my old age. Besides, weren't African slaves brought to Virginia in 1619, almost a generation earlier?

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. Yes, but a generation earlier

they were treated as indentured servants. Here is a piece of trivia learned from doing research into this period. The first slaves were not brought in a Dutch ship, as usually believed, but a british privateer flying the dutch flag.

Now back to the indentured stick. they were freed after their contract was done, and a few of them even owned indentured servants after their term of service was over.

As to your paranoia, are you paranoid really? Or are you right?

[riverwalker]

15. hey Ancestry guru guy on CNN

try researching Romney's family for any military service. Try Search. Military. You have the records going back to the revolution, try it. Won't find any. ZIP.
Hell, I have relatives from Norway that got off the ship in '61 and two years later enlisted with the Union in the 15th Wisconsin to fight slavery in the Civil War. The same time Romney's kin were hiding out from the feds with his 5 wives. How about WW1? My Dad's uncle arrived from Norway in '09, he had big dreams, started school to study botany. When WW1 began, he went back to europe to fight for the US took a hit, wounded severely became deaf and suffered from abdominal injury his whole life, left school, never married, became a cook in a lumber camp.
We all have these stories in our families, except Mitt. A family tradition of allegiance to only two things: Money and the Mormon church. Their nation, not so much.

[Spider Jerusalem]

21. Romney actually has one ancestor who served in the US military...

and who was a deserter.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/695208290/Romney-ancestor-fled-Army-joined-LDS-Church.html

[Avalux]

17. This is a fabricated story bought and paid for by the GOP.

There's no definitive proof and it really doesn't matter anyway. It doesn't surprise me this wouldn't be ignored without proof; that sort of thing doesn't seem to matter to the media or much of the electorate anymore.

The GOP base will be in a frenzy over this...insurance for Mittens. Hell, Mitt may even own Ancestry.com.

[Marrah_G]

18. Not sure I believe anything Ancestry.com says

Especially about the President. It's an LDS company.