A team of genealogists has found evidence that US President Barack Obama could have descended from an African slave – through his white mother.
... the maternal line traces back to one of the first documented African slaves in the US
The most likely lineage route, Mr Obama’s black father, had been followed and exhausted by researchers.
Instead, the link, genealogists with Ancestry.com say, is in fact through an examination of his white mother’s family history.
“We were surprised and excited to make that connection,” said Joseph Shumway, a member of the Utah-based Ancestry.com team.
Mr Obama’s father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. It had been generally assumed that the president had no slave ancestors because researchers could not find it through the lineage of his father.
But no one had yet performed any exhaustive research into the lineage of his white mother, who turns out to have a mixed-raced family history.
Ancestry.com now says the maternal line traces back to one of the first documented African slaves in the US.
The company said Mr Obama could be the 11th great-grandson of John Punch, an African slave in colonial Virginia.
He is believed to have had children with a white woman, starting a family line that led generations later to Mr Obama’s mother. The White House declined to comment.
The Ancestry.com team used DNA analysis and marriage and property records to trace Mr Obama’s maternal ancestry. The company says it cannot establish a definitive link because of gaps in family history.
Researchers are missing a record connecting Mr Punch to a presumed son, who by his early 20s owned 450 acres and grew tobacco in Virginia.
The records pick up when a grandson of Mr Punch petitioned a court to marry a white woman - and was turned down, presumably because the grandson appeared of mixed-raced heritage, said Elizabeth Mills, a former president of the American Society of Genealogists.
The Ancestry.com findings make for a tantalising tale that was not uncommon in early colonial Virginia, and the team probably got it right, Ms Mills, who reviewed the findings at Ancestry.com’s request, said.
“They did the best job possible,” she said.
Ancestry.com said its team spent two years exploring Mr Obama’s maternal line. The puzzle starts with Mr Punch, who is presumed to have arrived in Virginia around 1640 from west Africa, initially as an indentured servant obligated to work for years to pay for his passage.
“He jumped the gun and took off,” Ms Mills said. But Mr Punch was recaptured and made a slave for life. His punishment was tougher than white servants received for absconding, leading historians to call him the first African to be enslaved years before Virginia legalised slavery.
Nothing is known about Mr Punch’s presumed relationship with a white woman, but his landowner son is presumed to be John Bunch, either because the mixed-raced family changed its name or because records transcribed it incorrectly, Mr Shumway said.
Researchers were able to make a definitive connection between the successive Bunch family line and Mr Obama’s mother, Stanley Dunham, who died in 1995.
Researchers concluded John Bunch had to be the son of John Punch, Mr Shumway said.
“He’s in the right place at the right time and he’s the right age,” he said, adding that to this day, Bunch family members who appear white share the DNA profile of people in west Africa.
Ms Mills said she was not surprised by the slavery link that came through the lineage of Mr Obama’s white mother.
“There are many Americans discovering they have African ancestry. It’s something that is whispered, not something families want the world to know,” she said.