07-30-2012, 11:36 AM
interesting history...
DNA analysis and marriage and property records have suggested that Obama is the 11th great-grandchild of John Punch, who lived in colonial Virginia nearly four centuries ago. He was condemned to a life of slavery in the mid-1600s as a punishment for fleeing his job as a servant, and many historians deem him America's first black slave. He went on to have children with a white woman, who passed on her free status to them. The lineage is on the side of the president's white mother, Ann Dunham, pictured left with Obama as a child.
![[Image: article-2181027-144ABECD000005DC-579_636x381.jpg]](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/07/30/article-2181027-144ABECD000005DC-579_636x381.jpg)
NYTimes
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s biography — son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.
One tool used by a team of genealogists over the course of two years was an online database maintained by the Bunch family.
Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking, saying that Mr. Obama’s mother had, in addition to her European ancestors, at least one African forebear and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.
The findings are scheduled to be announced on Monday by Ancestry.com, a genealogy company based in Provo, Utah. Its team, while lacking definitive proof, said it had evidence that “strongly suggests” Mr. Obama’s family tree — on his mother’s side — stretches back nearly four centuries to a slave in colonial Virginia named John Punch.
In 1640, Mr. Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment — servitude for life — was harsher than what the white servants received, and it has led some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/oba...wanted=all
DNA analysis and marriage and property records have suggested that Obama is the 11th great-grandchild of John Punch, who lived in colonial Virginia nearly four centuries ago. He was condemned to a life of slavery in the mid-1600s as a punishment for fleeing his job as a servant, and many historians deem him America's first black slave. He went on to have children with a white woman, who passed on her free status to them. The lineage is on the side of the president's white mother, Ann Dunham, pictured left with Obama as a child.
NYTimes
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s biography — son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.
One tool used by a team of genealogists over the course of two years was an online database maintained by the Bunch family.
Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking, saying that Mr. Obama’s mother had, in addition to her European ancestors, at least one African forebear and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.
The findings are scheduled to be announced on Monday by Ancestry.com, a genealogy company based in Provo, Utah. Its team, while lacking definitive proof, said it had evidence that “strongly suggests” Mr. Obama’s family tree — on his mother’s side — stretches back nearly four centuries to a slave in colonial Virginia named John Punch.
In 1640, Mr. Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment — servitude for life — was harsher than what the white servants received, and it has led some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/oba...wanted=all