CNN news 2012-08-02 加文本

cnn news 2012-08-02

President Obama's story is well known. His father from Kenya, his mother from the United States, but ancestry.com says it has mapped out the Obama family tree going back 11 generations, with stunning conclusion.

Anastasia Harman is the company's lead family historian.

Anastasia Harman: “Our conclusion is that President Obama, the first African-American president, is the 11th great grandson of the first documented enslaved African in what would become the United States.”

The link is made not from his father's side, but from his mother, Ann Dunham’s lineage. She was connected back to a man named John Punch. Records show Punch, who lived in Virginia, had children with a white woman. Those children later became known as the Bunch family. The findings of the two-year study are now posted on the company's web site. So how did the research team figure this out?

Anastasia Harman: “As we're going, you know, from President Obama to his mom and grandmother and great grandmother. You're looking for like birth and marriage and death records, all those kind of records. As we get further back in time, though they weren't kept or they've been destroyed over time. In the civil war a lot of records with destroyed, fires, floods, things like that. So we start looking at what we call surviving records, church records, and land records when we get really far back into that. Here's John Bunch III who's born in 1680, from here and out we're looking at lands records.”

University of Maryland history professor, Ira Berlin, says all of this is perfectly plausible, because there was a time when white indentured servants(契约佣工) and black slaves freely intermingled.

Ira Berlin: “They worked together. They sleep together. They play together. Eventually they have children together. The status of those children followed the status of their mother. That is if your mother is white then you will be free.”

Lineage has become a fascinating side topic of this political season from Mitt Romney's morbid roots to the president's ancestry. But what matters, says cnn contributor Roland Martin is not so much the past, but the future.

Roland Martin: “This is not going to mean anything when it comes to voters. This is simply a matter of what his personal history is. Keep in mind, you can be Clarence Thomas and you can have a very clear African-American background going back generations. But do the policies that you articulate today, do they resonate with black voters?”

Clarence Thomas：美国法学家。自1991年以来担任美国最高法院大法官，是最高法院继瑟古德·马歇尔后第二位黑人法官，是最高法院的保守派之一。托马斯出身贫寒，靠曾是黑奴后代的外祖父抚养长大。耶鲁大学毕业后，曾在教育部任职，1982年获里根总统任命为公平就业机会委员会（EEOC）主席。