Well, specifically, a number of Sally Heming’s male descendants showed male Y chromosomes from the Jefferson family. You can trace Y chromosomes through uninterrupted male descent and mtDNA through uninterrupted female descent, but I am unaware of any ability to find “familial” DNA (yet). We certainly cannot find Y chromosome data among women or mtDNA if there is a male in the direct line.
The OP’s connection from the entries in the 1830/1840 censuses for Frederick Millner to the much earlier will with a reference to a similar name seems a little too tenuous for me. Not to say it’s impossible that it’s a link, but that it’s by no means certain. It’s certainly not enough to start explaining family myths about mixed-race ancestors, for instance. My advice is keep looking for other evidence…but don’t make the mistake of just looking for evidence that will ‘prove’ what you think you’ve found. Think CSI 
Oh I’m not assuming anything, and I most certainly don’t consider myself black, but it is an interesting and possible premise. I’m pretty sure if you trace the ancestry of all Dopers back you’d probably find a common ancestor way more recent than Alexander the Great for all Dopers, probably more recent than Shakespeare for all American born Dopers. I’ve always thought it was hysterical that anybody seriously believes there’s any such thing as a “pure race” (whatever the hell that is) in the 21st century, but they do.
On a side note about “race mixin’”, I’ve heard the same story from my mother, other relatives, and from both black and white schoolteachers and co-workers so many times that I can start reciting it as a catechism after the opening sentence. “There was this woman in [Montgomery or other Alabama locale] a few years back, and she married this man who was new to the town and that nobody knew. He was a real tan white man with coarse hair and he told her that his grandmama was a [Cherokee or other Indian nation] and that’s how he got his coloring. Well, they were all happy and everything, and then she learned she was pregnant, and they were all happy waiting for the baby, and then it was born and it was black as [Sammy Davis, Jr. or equivalently dark skinned celebrity], and that’s when he came clean with her. He was passing. And his grandmother came down from [Detroit or other northern metropolis with large black population] to take the baby to be raised by their people, and she was black as [Hattie McDaniel or other equivalently dark skinned celebrity].”
I’m guessing that on its mother’s side this same poor baby was a cousin of that hillbilly girl Female (pron. ‘feh-MOLLY’) that everybody swears they went to school with or otherwise knew, and on its dad’s side it was a cousin of the twins Lemonjello and Oranjello that everybody saw play basketball or knew someone who did. The most horrifying thing about this story to me and many others of my generation who heard it was “She gave away her baby to people she’d never met because it was black?” but I think the real moral is “don’t marry people whose family you don’t know or aren’t related to”. I’d love to know if this is a UL heard outside of Alabama in particular or the South in general.
Like Sampiro, I’m a Southerner, and like many Southerners I have a strong interest in genealogy. My biological father’s side is mostly a blank but I’ve done a lot of research on my maternal ancestry. My grandmother was a Melungeon, one of the Mestee people of the Appalachias, and through her I probably have all sorts of interesting ethnic ancestry. A lot of white Southerners have hidden black ancestors that they either know nothing about or pointedly ignore. There was a LOT of race mixing in the pre-and-post Antebellum South, and not all of it was white slaveowners raping their slaves, either. There’s even a saying in Mississippi called “nigger in a woodpile” – the saying goes if you see a white couple with three or four little blond blue-eyed kids, and then there’s the one swarthy, dark-eyed child, then “the mama’s been sneaking around with the nigger behind the woodpile”.
Very true. Much of it after slavery was consentual, and as I mentioned above there were a lot more white women with black kids than you’d think. (The Delaney sisters of Having Our Say were descended from a consentual relationship between a white plantation mistress and one of her slaves that produced several children.)
My grandfather Mustang was slapped by his mother (ca. 1910) when he was a kid for referring to a red haired biracial kid as “Cousin Perry”. He then told her “Well I guess I oughtta call him Lord & Savior then, cause his mama’s lived with Uncle Wilson for twenty years and ain’t never married or had a boyfriend and keeps on having kids that are lighter than she is and have blue eyes so I reckon God must be doing it.” That got him slapped again, but his father was laughing so hard that he made the mother back off.
Mustang’s best friends (and distant cousins) was tubercular back when that was BAD BAD news. People wouldn’t socialize with tuberculars or even buy a house that had been lived in by one, and not without reason because it was highly contagious. His name was Walter Carter and he owned a lot of property but he was essentially a leper due to his condition, so he lived in a big rambling old frame house (still there, long abandoned) just outside of the tiny town they lived in with his “cleaning woman”, a black woman who was extremely well read (though of course formally uneducated, this being the post-Depression south) and who was a bit “disturbed” as well. She eventually became his live-in housekeeper and the two of them had several children who were pariahs in both the black and white community, and to whom when talking with my grandfather he openly referred to as “my boy Sam” or “my little Polly” or whatever.
My mother, who was friends with one of the daughters (for there really were black/white friendships that long ago) said one of his daughters was considered the belle of the area and even had, secretly, white suitors. When the kids got older they left the area. Some went to college, some went north, but even after their mother died they continued to come home and see their father, whom they loved. My mother recalls that he kept photographs and wedding/graduation/birth announcements on his walls just as any father would and made no bones about the relationship. He had very few white visitors due to his illness, growing alcoholism and orneriness and his openness about his kids, but to the ones who did visit and could accept it he was very hospitable.
All hell broke loose when he died and left his money and his lands to his children. (He didn’t live like it, but he was very well to do in terms of property.) His white nephews and nieces sued to break the will, and very probably would have won, but they opted to settle out of court to avoid publicity. Essentially the kids got the money and car and other “movable” wealth, while the white relatives got most of the land he owned.
Anyway, sorry for the long windedness, but such relationships existed, and a lot more like Strom Thurmond’s lovechild existed. There were also a lot of light skinned black people who went west and passed as Mexicans or Indians (which was easier to do in an area where people weren’t as used to black people).
That’s a saying you still hear occasionally from older or “less formal” people- I’ve even heard it from black people a couple of times, though I think its origins have been forgotten by many who still use it. Today it usually means “something’s not quite right in this situation”, as in “That bar was always crowded and doing money hand over fist, but now its closed down and the owner says he’s broke… there’s a n***** in the woodpile there somewhere”.
Racial mixing in the Old South is an interesting topic, and I’d like to hear about other areas, too. It wasn’t just black and white, either, which is of course the first thing people think about Mississippi. Around 1910 or so, lots of Chinese were brought to Mississippi to work the cotton fields, and the ones that stayed married black women. There’s plenty of black folks down on the Delta who have Chinese grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Lebanese immigrants tended to marry whites, and I went to college with lots of kids who were one-fourth or one-eighth Lebanese.
My own great-great-great-grandmother, Verlinda Harvey, is called a “mulatto” in the 1860 census, but changes to “white” after that. We know who her daddy was, but her momma’s always been a mystery. Maybe her mother was a light-skinned black woman, and her white father successfully passed her off as white for most of her life. We’re not sure. Sometimes you find white men living with black women in unofficial partnerships that might as well be marriage, like your distant cousin Walter Carter, and white women with black men, too. In the Douglas Register, Rev. William Douglas of VA records the birth of a son, Richardson, in 1760 to James Mathews (“negro”) and Susannah Fford (“white”). There was plenty of people “passing”, moving to a new area and reinventing themselves as white. Black women were also especially vulnerable to rape.
The first time I ever heard of that was in an interview with Whoopi Goldberg. She had a Chinese grandmother or great-grandmother who was brought over as a peasant and married a local black man.
Legendary bluesman Muddy Waters was often described as having Oriental eyes. Wonder if that was a coincidence or if there was a Mongolian in the woodpile?
Census records before 1850 do not include an exact age. Ok, sometimes they do freaky things and you might find one guy who did but what you have in 1840 is a column for people aged 20 to 29. Then they put the number of people in that household that fit in that column. Then the next one would be 30 to 39. So you get a range. Since the range used in each census can change you can whittle it down a bit. Say 1840 his him born between 1771 and 1780 and 1820 puts him born before 1775 then you can say he was born between 1771 and 1775.
A lot of early censuses are lost. So Georgia’s 1790, 1800 and 1810 are lost. Virginia has no 1790 or 1800. Alabama doesn’t have one till 1830.
Your best bet is in county records. Especially the Judical records. Have you had any fun at the Library of Virginia? They have land records and several indexes up. Georgia also has tons of neat stuff.
Hmm, I’ve got a Verlinda Harvey relation by marriage. But she was born 1795 in Georgia died 1841 in Russell Co., AL and married a guy named Cyrus White.
It’s not as exciting or obvious as it could be. That match from could just be some guy living in China that mistakenly put down his address rather then where his line originates. Or you could be like me and still waiting after 5 years for a single match. I’ve only got 3 false matches so far.
I grew up in the North, but I heard a version of this story told about the entertainer Dinah Shore, who supposedly had a black child when recessive genes emerged in a baby fathered by actor George Montgomery. Scroll down to the bottom of this page for a cite (the relevant post features red text).
Bugger, you’re right. I had looked at a digital chart that gave the information, but upon pulling up the actual PDF copy of the census his age is only a check mark. I don’t know how they got the info, but I’ve sent an e-mail to ask. (I hope I don’t have to take back all those dashikis.)
The Census also has a lot of “now you see 'em, now you don’t” entries. My father’s family, for example, people that I grew up knewing well, will appear in the 1890 and 1920 and 1930 censuses, but in 1900 and 1910 when they were in exactly the same house, they don’t appear in the censuses for those years.
Another oddity I discovered in looking at PDF files: I found my randy grandfather Mustang’s WWI Draft Registration card. Mustang married his only wife, Meemaw, in 1921, but on his Draft card marital status is entered as “Married”, which is then crossed out with a line and “Single” written in its place. I wonder what that was about.
On the subject of biracial children, a case that I’m sure is already known to many Dopers but one that isn’t known to the world at large is that of George Wythe (pronounced “with”) and Michael Brown. This is a case that should be taught in high schools because imo it’s second only to Dred Scott in legal cases about slavery.
Synopsis: Wythe was from a Virginia planter family and became a lawyer and law professor at William & Mary. He was considered one of the most brilliant minds in the colonies, his students included Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (both of whom regarded him as a beloved mentor) and he signed the Declaration of Independence. He inherited slaves from his parents and from both of his wives but he hated the practice and put his money where his mouth was- even though they constituted a large part of his wealth he freed them upon the death of his second wife (save for a few that he returned, along with the house she inherited from her father, to her family, possibly to avoid litigation).
In spite of freeing his slaves, or perhaps because of, he was one of the few wealthy Virginians who was actually solvent and had more cash than debt. By 1806 he had been an 80 year old childless widower for almost 20 years, but he had adopted his grandnephew, George Wythe Sweney, and had come to care greatly for a free mulatto youth named Michael Brown. Brown lived in Wythe’s house, ate his meals at the table with him, Wythe educated the boy with private tutors, wanted to make him a lawyer, and it was soon revealed that he left him about 50% of his liquid estate (making him a well-to-do young man by 1806 Virginia standards), slighting his grandnephew and other white relatives in the process.
There is much speculation that Brown was Wythe’s biological son, all based on circumstantial evidence, mainly that
1- why, after a whole lifetime spent around free and enslaved blacks, did he care so much about this boy?
2- Brown would have been born a few years after the death of Wythe’s second wife, and no mention is made of the boy’s parentage- could it be that in his loneliness he took a black woman as concubine and fathered this child in his early 60s?
3- even if a young mulatto boy had come along and somehow dazzled the old man with his intellect to the point Wythe wanted to educate him, why then proceed to leave him so much money when he had numerous blood relatives who were in need? He also asked his former student and protege, Jefferson, who was then the president of the United States, to be the child’s guardian in the event of his death, which is also a bit of a stretch for a man who just happens to like the kid. (Wythe provided generously for other former slaves as well, including a house and pension to his housekeeper Lydia Broadnax, but nowhere near what he was leaving Brown.)
Whatever the case, Wythe’s grandnephew Sweney was a villain worthy of Shakespeare, a drunk and gambler who forged notes on his uncle’s accounts and lived for the day he’d inherit. When he learned that Wythe’s will left a large chunk of the estate he felt should be his to Brown, Sweney decided to fix the situation by killing Brown and his uncle. In full view of Lydia Broadnax he dumped arsenic into the coffee pot (claiming it was a “special seasoning”) and burned the packet it came in. Broadnax, Brown and Wythe all drank the coffee and fell violently ill. Brown died, Broadnax recovered, and Wythe lingered for days.
When Wythe recovered enough of his strength to learn Brown was dead he was devastated, and he also knew (from Lydia and from others who informed him of Sweney’s forgeries on his account) what had happened. He changed his will to completely disinherit Sweney, then died. Sweney was arrested for his murder.
Lydia Broadnax was an eyewitness to what had happened. Sweney had the means and a clear motive for the crime. Everybody knew Sweney was the killer, it was an open and shut case, and Sweney walked out of the courtroom a free man. Because no person of color, even one who was free and (courtesy of Wythe) owned her own house, could testify against a white person, Lydia’s word meant nothing and the rest of the evidence was circumstantial. Thomas Jefferson was asked by prosecutors to intervene but did not (very probably because it was a really bad time to ask him to step in to a situation involving a mulatto child- the Sally Hemings accusations were still very fresh). This was a major case of the Good Ol’ Boy System protecting its own.
There was a very muted justice in that Sweney did go to debtors prison for a time and had to leave the community because everybody knew he was a killer. He disappears altogether from the historical record, though stories at the time stated he was indigent and had spent tim in a penitentiary in Tennessee. Lydia Broadnax (who Fawn Brodie claims was Brown’s mother, but there is absolutely no evidence for this and she would have been old enough to be his grandmother) lived out her days in the house she inherited and Thomas Jefferson provided for her some financially when she needed items she couldn’t afford on her pension, but her absolute evidence about her employer and his ward’s poisoning were worthless, and after this trial things became increasingly more difficult for free people of color in Virginia. (Eventually they had to leave the state 1 year after their manumission.)
I don’t have any cites at hand, but in the last few years it’s come to light that Virginia’s census for the early parts of the 20th centruy aren’t too accurate anymore. I can’t find the name, but the guy running the program then refused to ackowledge that the Native Americans were a separate “race” when it came to the census, and had most of them marked as “Negro”. This has really screwed things up for the descendants of the local tribes: trying to establish that they exist going back to the 1600s isn’t possible because of the shenanigans this guy did with the official census figures. I’m pointing this out to show that there may be more errors/fraudulent info in there that was officially (at some level or another) sanctioned.
I remembered this story coming up in another thread, but forgot the man’s name. A bit of Googling has revealed the answer – WAlter Ashby Plecker.
Probably not related to my Verlinda, who was born in Smith Co., MS in 1815. Her father was Thomas Harvey (c.1780-1840) of SC and VA who moved to Marion Co., MS by 1812. Maybe distant cousins. Verlinda wasn’t an uncommon name back then, though it seems to have died out almost completely today.
Uh oh, scratch that! I rechecked my Harvey genealogy (available on request), and your Verlinda IS related to mine. In fact, they’re aunt and niece. As follows:
- William Harvey (c.1740, VA-1787/8, SC), married Verlinda (?Wade?) with ten children including:
1.1. Verlinda Harvey (c.1765-1841), married Rev. Cyrus White
1.1. Thomas Harvey, by unknown mother:
1.1.1. Verlinda Harvey, married John Chisholm.
So we’s cousins, whaddya know!