Genealogy fun and games - Barack Obama edition
Remember the flap when it was shown that
Strom Thurmond's family once owned a member of Rev. Al Sharpton's?
Here it comes again -- from South Carolina's
The State:
Genealogist finds Obama's ancestors owned slaves
Barack Obama has been criticized for not being "black enough" because he isn't descended from slaves.
Now it turns out the Illinois senator is actually descended from slaveowners. In the campaign trail's latest side trip into ancestry, genealogist William Reitwiesner compiled a family tree and found that a great-great-great-grandfather of Obama's white mother owned slaves.
Kentucky records from 1850 show that George Washington Overall - Obama's great-great-great-great grandfather - owned two slaves.
So did one of his great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, according to the Baltimore Sun, which confirmed Reitwiesner's work.
The
Baltimore Sun also has the story:
A new twist to an intriguing family history
Census records, genealogical research show forebears of Obama's mother had slaves
Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas.
But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now: It appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and census records.
The records - which had never been addressed publicly by the Illinois senator or his relatives - were first noted in an ancestry report compiled by William Addams Reitwiesner, who works at the Library of Congress and practices genealogy in his spare time. The report, on Reitwiesner's Web site, carries a disclaimer that it is a "first draft" - one likely to be examined more closely if Obama is nominated.
According to the research, one of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.
The Sun retraced much of Reitwiesner's work, using census information available on the Web site ancestry.com and documents retrieved by the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, among other sources. The records show that Overall, then 30, owned a 15-year-old black female and a 25-year-old black male, while Mary Duvall, his mother-in-law, owned a 60-year-old black man and a 58-year-old black woman. (Slaves are listed in the 1850 census by owner, age, "sex," and "colour," not by name.)
An Obama spokesman did not dispute the information and said that the senator's ancestors "are representative of America."
The home page for
William Addams Reitwiesner can be found here -- he has a lot more data as well as Genealogical studies of other people.
Posted by DaveH at March 3, 2007 9:13 AM
| TrackBack