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Sins of the Great-Great-Great Grandfather

Baltimore Sun goes after Obama’s slave-owning ancestors but misses the (alleged) bigamist in the foreground.

If you could take that slave thing far back enough, I bet you’d find that not only do you have a lot of odd family relationships on this side of the pond, but there are probably some people who are descended from the same West Africans who sold their other West African ancestors into slavery.

History is a bitch that way. But this is a fascinating new development in American politics … looking centuries back for any hint of hypocrisy or scandal.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure how well I’d fare.  You never know what you’ll find when you climb back up the family tree. I’m sure all my good readers are descended from the great kings of Ireland, Norman gentry, pharoahs, whatever you like. I’ve seen an 18th century Writ of Rogue and Vagabond that suggests my own line of Kentish yeomanry may begin with a bar wench’s bastard.*  If he’s who I think he is, he made out well for himself, and spawned a line of entrepreneurial landlords who poured ale to slake the thirst of great nations and knew which horse to bet on, among other worthy traits and deeds.  Then there’s that Anglo-Irish strain. Up to the usual. You know, oppressing other Irishmen before moving on to occupy stolen Aboriginal and Maori lands.  

And that’s way before we get to all the marauding Vikings, Saxons and Celts who were all busy using battle axes to oppress each other’s foreheads and the foreheads of anyone whose path they crossed.  

Well, as the Lord of Swamp Castle puts it so eloquently in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

“This is supposed to be an ‘appy occasion! Let’s not bicker and argue about ‘oo killed ‘oo.”

* Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a Hogarthian tale of 18th-century English hardship, a mother on the road alone with two brats, throwing herself on the mercy of a parish not her own. Neither barwench nor bastard status confirmed, but if they ever are, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. Genealogy is a dodgy game at best.  No matter how good your documents are, as a friend of mine once put it, the odds that someone jumped over the back fence and your last name isn’t what you think it is go up with each generation.

Whatever. Sooner or later, we’re all Africans, anyway.   Very closely related Africans.

Topics: Uncategorized

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:10 am on Friday, March 2, 2007

11 Responses to “Sins of the Great-Great-Great Grandfather”

1. El Cid Says:
   March 2nd, 2007 at 12:13 pm

   So ummmm, The Baltimore Sun is/are Hillary voters? Have the authors of this article traced their family tree, or are they stumped?

2. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   March 2nd, 2007 at 2:08 pm

   My father’s side of the family comes from the Kentucky/Tennessee area as well, so it’s possible that I have slave owners in my lineage.

   Then again, it’s fairly certain that Benedict Arnold is in my family tree (way way way way waaaaaaaaay off to one side, 12th cousin 3.75 times removed, or something like that), on my mother’s side. Would my father have married my mother, knowing her dark history? Would Mom have rejected Dad’s advances upon realizing she might marry someone associated with (gasp!!) slavery?

   More to the point, should I have never joined the Army, given my scurilous past? Am I qualified to snark here, let alone comment on the social and political issues du jour?

   Oh, give me a break, newsmongers of the universe! There are other news worthy events worth covering, not just digging up dirt in the graveyard.

   There are plenty of reasons why Obama isn’t a viable candidate for President; who begat whom way back when isn’t even close to being one of them.

   This digging for dirt multiple generations back is just plain stupid.

3. Jules Crittenden Says:
   March 2nd, 2007 at 2:15 pm

   Benedict Arnold? That’s a good one. One of my (henpecked) ancestors reportedly signed up to go on the Burke and Wills expedition, which crossed Australia but ended badly. Then his wife said, “Where the hell do you think you’re going? You’ve got four kids.”

4. RebeccaH Says:
   March 2nd, 2007 at 2:35 pm

   Thanks for the link to Babel’s Dawn, Jules, another great, geeky blog.

   For the record, I am descended from Southern slaveowners. It’s a fact of life I long ago reconciled, and as I explained to my horrified children, those were the deeds of centuries past when people had a different view of the world. You can go back through the generations forever, and it’s all a litany of struggle, achievement, failure, passion, lots of sex, and sheer, dumb endurance, with maybe a murder or two thrown in here and there, and probably just enough thievery to get by. If we are as smart as we can get, then we are just smart enough to keep trying to be better.

   Psst, El Cid. The Paleobiochemistry Association Concerning Organisms kit came in the mail, but all it contained was a syringe and a petri dish. Isn’t there a manual, or something?

5. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   March 2nd, 2007 at 2:57 pm

   OOOOOOOOO!!! A henpecked husband in the family tree, Jules? Are you sure you’re qualified to comment on moral issues today?

   ;-P

6. Jules Crittenden Says:
   March 2nd, 2007 at 3:50 pm

   You gotta point, JeffS … you thought about applying for the Murtha spokesman job? Sounds like you have the genetic credentials.

7. The Slash and Burn Politics has taken a new low….again…. « The Populist Moderate Says:
   March 2nd, 2007 at 3:55 pm

   [...] NewsBusters.org, Jules Crittenden, The Moderate Voice, MyDD, Villainous Company, The Carpetbagger Report, Scared Monkeys, The Virginian, Booker Rising, CNN Political Ticker, QandO, Knowledge is Power [...]

8. El Cid Says:
   March 2nd, 2007 at 5:03 pm

   RebeccaH

   The Paleobiochemistry Association Concerning Organisms kit came in the mail, but all it contained was a syringe and a petri dish.

   Ummmm, the Paleobiochemistry Association Concerning Organisms Society, just talks about that crap, I mean stuff, whatever….WE never, NEVER, touch any of that stuff. Where the hell the syringe and the other thing came from, have no idea…But found you a
   manual of sorts.

9. saltydog Says:
   March 2nd, 2007 at 7:37 pm

   Well, I have some ol’ ancestor who owned a couple of slaves. And I’ll see your Benedict Arnold and raise you my Patrick Henry. There’s also a Cherokee in the family woodpile. Those Cherokees got around a lot. While this says something about particular ancestors, none of it says a damn thing about me. I’m neither a slave owner nor a racist; I’m certainly not a courageous orator or hero; the Cherokees are sympathetic, but say I don’t have enough “blood” to matter.

   I think the left has stood with the enemy for so long now that they’ve gone all tribal. It seems that ideas may count more to the individual than one’s ancestry. Go figure.

10. Who Would Benefit the Most? at No Man’s Blog Says:
    March 3rd, 2007 at 9:53 am

    [...] The Obama ancestry story has been flying all over the blogosphere.  On the off chance that you haven’t heard about it yet, here it is straight from the Baltimore Sun (via Jules Crittenden): 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.) [...]

11. Blair Case Says:
    March 3rd, 2007 at 1:01 pm

    Many African Americans who researched their family tree would be shocked to discover they have black ancestors who owned slaves. In the United States, free black Americans as well as whites owned slaves (one of the South’s biggest slave owners was a freed black man). The precentage of free blacks who owned slaves was small, but so was the percentage of whites who owned slaves. African Americans who traced their roots back to Africa would discover virtually all their African ancestors were involved in the slave trade. Africans tribes which was run by African tribes. Virtually everyone, regardless of their race and ethnic group, are related both to slaves and slave owners.

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