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Mystery surrounds the white branch of Michelle Obama's family tree
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Barack Obama and his daughters aren't the only members of the first family with biracial roots. Count First Lady Michelle Obama and her mother, Marian Robinson (nee Shields) in too.
A genealogist and New York Times reporters have traced earlier branches of Michelle Obama's family tree back to her great-great-great-grandparents, a slave girl named Melvinia and a mysterious white man.
The finding supports longstanding family rumors of a white ancestor, according to the Times.
In a comment on the Oct. 8 Times article, Annette Gordon-Reed, who wrote about the Hemingses of Monticello, noted that the vast majority of black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in North America have some degree of mixed ancestry.
In fact, Michelle Obama's background is far from unique. Despite anti-miscegenation laws (which banned marriage or sexual relations between a man and woman of different races) and social convention, an enormous amount of “race-mixing” has long occurred in the United States, notes Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates.
Up to 35 percent of black males can trace their paternal lineage via DNA back to a white man who got a black woman pregnant most likely during slavery, he says.
When she was 8 years old, Melvinia's elderly master on a South Carolina estate died and her world turned upside down. She was sent away from her family and friends and shipped off to Georgia to work on a 200-acre farm. Her new masters, Christianne and Henry Shields were the daughter and son-in-law of her old master.
Melvinia might have been as young as 15 when a white man got her pregnant. A son, Dolphus Shields, who was later described as very light skinned, was born around 1859. A mystery surrounds who done it. Was it Henry Shields, who was in his late 40s? Or one of his four sons, ages 19 to 24? Or perhaps some other man on the farm? No one knows for sure.
Megan Smolenyak, the genealogist who did part of the research, told Irish Times that a good first guess could be Charles, one of Christianne and Henry Shields’s sons. In the 1870 census, she notes, they were living "smack next door to each other.”
The 1870 census lists three of Melvinia's four children as mulatto, or people of mixed black and white parentage. The Times article notes that Melvinia gave her children the Shields name, which may have just reflected the custom of former slaves who took their master's surnames. Or it might have partially answered a key question: Who's your father?
For more info check out:
- the original New York Times article, In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery
- and related commentary
- the census document from 1870 that lists Michelle Obama's ancestor
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Photo credit: AP/Dharapak.
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