Does Barack Obama have any black US slave ancestors? I’d doubt it since his black father is from Kenya. He may have had some removed cousins.
My question is about Michelle Obama, does anyone know how far back you’d have to go in her lineage to find a slave? Would it be her great-great-great-grandparent?
Don’t have an answer for you - but serious question - why does it matter?
It doesn’t have to matter to ask the question. She’s a public figure, she mentioned slavery in a speech the other day, people may be curious.
I get that - and I wasn’t suggesting that it ‘mattered’ - but I was just curious as to the context for the question itself - If someone was fact checking a claim, or something to that affect.
According to the wiki for Marian Shields Robinson, Michelle’s mother:
Marian was born in 1937. Conceivably a great-grandparent of Michelle was born a slave, and one more generation would have been in the right time frame although still not long before emancipation if they were slaves. So assuming slave ancestry up until emancipation, great-great-great-grandparent would be likely.
In her speech she mentioned the white house being built by slaves, they are the first black presidential family. I’m wondering how far back you have to go to find an ancestor who was a slave.
Apparently it was her great-great-grandfather, Dolphus Shields, who was born in Georgia in 1860.
According to some research, he does, but it’s through his white mother:
Also, there are reports that Barack’s mother was descended from John Punch, the first documented slave in the American colonies.
How much weight do you put on this evidence, from ancestry.com (a commercial, not scientific enterprise)? Seems like a bit of hand-waving to me.
There’s a link at the bottom of the page to their research, including a 45-page article. Why don’t you read it and report back to us.
Geneology is history, not science. I don’t see any reason in principle why a commercial site dedicated to it might not have professional capacity in the field.
I read most of that article several years ago and reported on it at SDMB.
Another genealogist suspects that Ralphe Bunche, the Nobel-prize winning diplomat, was also an agnatic descendant of the same Bunch family. (His son Ralph Bunche, Jr., would be in his 70’s if still alive. Has he had his Y-chromosome tested?)
I agree about the commercial/professional distinction, but anyone who had dabbled in genealogy will be aware that it is easy to make false assumptions that can lead one off into a totally wrong tree, never mind, branch.
Finding a marriage record of someone with a nearly correct name (spelling was highly variable) on the right date and in the correct place, is not evidence that that particular person was actually the one being looked for. So, yes it may be history, but it is necessary to apply scientific rigor as well.