Filling in President Obama’s family tree a claim at a time

Published 5:00 am Sunday, August 5, 2012

The narrative of President Barack Obama’s family embedded in the American psyche gained a new layer last week as a team of genealogists found evidence that he is most likely a descendant of one of the first documented African slaves in this country.

The link to slavery, which scholars of genealogy and race in America called remarkable, was found 400 years back in the lineage of Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. It was discovered by a team of four genealogists from Ancestry.com who worked for two years on the findings released in a report Monday.

Using property and tax records, the team uncovered “a lot of context and circumstantial evidence” that points to an enslaved black man named John Punch as Obama’s ancestor, said Joseph Shumway, one of the genealogists who worked on the report.

Because his father emigrated from Kenya and his mother was born in Kansas, Obama was thought to have no direct links to American slavery.

“His tree is one of the most dynamic that we’ve seen as far as diversity,” said Shumway, whose company also helped uncover the president’s Irish ancestry and that Obama is a distant cousin of Warren Buffett. “There are so many ways that we’ve been able to find interesting stories and connection points.”

Punch is a significant historical figure, who has long been a subject of research. In 1640, he and two European-American indentured servants were arrested for running away from their masters in Colonial Virginia. The two white men, a Dutchman and a Scot, received four additional years of servitude, but the black man, Punch, was to “serve his said master … for the time of his natural life,” said Peter Wood, a professor emeritus of history at Duke University who has written about Africans in Colonial America. Punch is thought of as the first black slave in Virginia.

“We often need specific names to help us understand sweeping social changes. Punch gives us the story of a real person who endured the beginnings of a huge social shift,” Wood said of Punch’s significance.

Interest in the family trees of Obama and his wife, which began when he ran for president, have served to highlight the unique role of race in American history and upend assumptions, said Sheryll Cashin, a Georgetown University law professor who researched her own family history in the book “The Agitator’s Daughter.”

“It’s absolutely poetic,” Cashin said of the discovery. “Race mixing was here from the beginning. It was there in the family of his mother, who looks phenotypically white. We didn’t have fixed racial identities at the beginning of this country. It’s only because of economic reasons that these hierarchies got introduced.”

The discovery comes at a time when Americans of all backgrounds have been digging deeper into their family trees. It was such familial research that led the team at Ancestry.com to make the connection between Punch and Obama’s family line. They first traced Obama’s mother’s heritage through her maternal grandmother to the Bunch family, who at one time lived in Virginia and “passed for white” and “intermarried with local white families,” according to the report. Members of the modern Bunch family, who had already begun to dig into the family’s heritage, had already conducted DNA testing that found that the family had an ancestor from Africa, and posted that information on a family website. Shumway and his colleagues set out to find that black ancestor.

The records eventually led them to Punch, who was one of only 150 Africans living in Virginia in the mid-1600s, and fathered a free child by a white woman. That the family name changed from Punch to Bunch was not uncommon in an era when there was no standardized spelling, Shumway said.

Past studies have linked Obama to at least six U.S. presidents as distant cousins, including George W. Bush and his father, Gerald Ford, Lyndon B. Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison. But other cousins include British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, his 2008 rival Sen. John McCain (through a Scottish line) and actor Brad Pitt, claimed as a ninth cousin linked back to Edwin Hickman, who died in Virginia in 1769.