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Of course, Obama related to first black slave on his, um, mother’s side

Of course, Obama related to first black slave on his, um, mother’s side

CNN is hyping this story, but when you dig into it, there’s no firm evidence, only piecing together assumptions and conjecture.

Obama’s family tree connection to first African American slave (emphasis mine):

His family tree has been linked to Brad Pitt, Sarah Palin and both Presidents Bush but now President Barack Obama may be related to the first documented African slave in pre-revolutionary America….

“We have two of the most significant Africans in our country’s history being directly related to each other,” Joseph Shumway, an Ancestry.com genealogist, told CNN….

Yet the greatest obstacle was the volume of records that had been lost or destroyed over the last three hundred plus years.  The researchers had to use clues to cobble together some of the facts….  Through these deductions genealogists were able to trace the president’s lineage to a Caucasian family in revolutionary Virginia named Bunch.

But the question remained: were any sub-Saharan Africans also members of the Bunch family?

Shumway said the team “gleaned” every possible clue and came to the conclusion the Caucasian Bunch family was indeed related to African American John Punch.

“[A]ll of the surviving evidence we studied very strongly points to conclusion John Bunch is the son of John Punch,” said Shumway.

For instance, in 1640 population counts show there were only 150 Africans living in pre-revolutionary Virginia.  Shumway points to other clues such as the phonetic similarities between Bunch and John Punch’s name.  He says that in colonial times spellings were not standardized and genealogists routinely find the same surname spelled quite differently.  In addition Shumway found evidence that the family that owned the slave John Punch married and lived for generations with members of the Bunch family.

“[A] lot of pieces of circumstantial evidence pointed at John Punch as the only logical candidate who could fit as this African American ancestor,” of the Bunch family said Shumway.

Et tu, Ancestry.com? Why have you sold your integrity by “cobbling” together facts, making “deductions” and ultimately telling us that Obama is related to slave “John Punch” because the last name sounds like Obama’s mother’s ancestor “Bunch.”

I’m just waiting for someone to link Obama’s first black slave ancestor to Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee ancestor, you know, the one with the high cheekbones.

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Comments

Of course he is. When you can’t run on your record….things need to be “made up” to make your case. Besides, I saw his birth certificate, and this is what it says on that!! Hahahahahaha

LukeHandCool | July 31, 2012 at 11:18 am

Okay, what’s the name of the cookbook?

Ancestry again. Aren’t we all descendants of someone? It’s not like establishing family claims to the throne or to being a member of the superior race or anything. We are supposed to be a classless society (as if) yet so many are forever preoccupied with pedigree. What has that done for the British? You know, the royals with bad teeth, narrow-set eyes and sloped foreheads?

Were these “experts” to prove that Obama is a descendant of the SECOND slave, would the difference matter? What exactly is the point here?

At best, it’s interesting. If true.

These people are losing their minds before our eyes. It would be tragicomic if it weren’t so socially dangerous.

    Ragspierre in reply to raven. | July 31, 2012 at 12:11 pm

    But isn’t the corollary to the story that Obama’s family were some of the earliest slave OWNERS in America…???

    Hmmm….

    JackRussellTerrierist in reply to raven. | July 31, 2012 at 1:33 pm

    Look at all our science has accomplished – curing or mitigating so many horrific diseases, walking on the moon, exploring the depths of the universe, sending a shuttle back and forth to space as though it was a local bus making its rounds, developing little hand-held devices that allow us to speak with somebody else located half-way around the earth in seconds, and delivering an item made of raw materials from around the world to one address out of the millions in two days. We defy gravity by moving millions of people through the air each year and then set them down on Mother Earth as gently as a baby. We build and place huge derricks to harvest an energy resource and we build locks and ships that move billions of tons of goods to the far corners of the world. We build a cyberspace system of hundreds of millions of intangible locations that we can access through a screen on a device before us weighing less than a pound, giving voice to anyone, anywhere, any time who wishes to speak, love, show, sell or help, hurt or hinder.

    We do all this, and then Ancestry.com comes along and displays to the world our idiocy in all its glory.

I though Obama claimed he had Irish ancestry.

What a crock of bullshit. Now Obama is “everyman”?

Ancestry.com is in the business of making money. So long as you know that, you know what to do with this story.

DINORightMarie | July 31, 2012 at 11:45 am

Ancestry.com is a Mormon company. They keep records various religious reasons.

Guess not all Mormons are Romney fans. Or, they are very fluent in the language of GREEN. 😉 Which the lefties are also well versed in…..

Henry Hawkins | July 31, 2012 at 11:45 am

Methinks some Obama supporter within Ancestry.com has been tasked to create another diversion. They hope political opponents and the media will make a big deal out of this dubious ancestral assumption. Any time spent away from talking about the economy is time well spent (to them). They keep throwing crap agin the wall hoping something will stick and soak up media focus.

Please, big name conservatives/Republicans… ignore this whole ‘story’, and focus on the economy.

“Yet the greatest obstacle was the volume of records that had been lost or destroyed over the last three hundred plus years.”

Or the records never kept. Until the latter years of the 1800s, birth records were not even kept in large parts of the U.S.

So, yeah. That lack of ANYTHING really would be kinduva problem. Objectively.

Any chance Joseph Shumway is related to Gordon Shumway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Shumway#Gordon_Shumway_.28ALF.29

NC Mountain Girl | July 31, 2012 at 11:57 am

DNA tests, anyone?

    Milwaukee in reply to NC Mountain Girl. | July 31, 2012 at 2:57 pm

    Yes. DNA tests. I will bet dollars to doughnuts that Barack Hussein Obama is not his father. Run some DNA on others who are, and see.

I am going to gag. This is worse than using family lore for one’s heritage. I’ve been doing genealogy for over 25 years and you just don’t make assumptions like that. Now his supporters will truly view His coming is the resurrection. Jesus Christ! Stop this! That is a prayer by the way.

TrooperJohnSmith | July 31, 2012 at 12:02 pm

Amazing, work this.

Let’s see, when you look at your ancestry, it doubles, exponentially every generation. Two parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, etc. Run that out about 25 generations, and you can see that we’re probably all from the same huge gene pool, or cesspool, as it were. Our interrelationship is especially significant when you consider that past about 7 generations ago, populations remained generally static from a geographic standpoint.

However, I’m so used to suspecting the Team Obama’s motives, that this appears to me as just another attempt to mythologize the man. They’re trying to grab lightning in a bottle in the vein of Hope & Change, to make him relevant again to the average hyphenated-American, without tarnishing the luster of the Real Chicago Jesus.

To that, folks, can I get a resounding Amen!?

“Yet the greatest obstacle was the volume of records that had been lost or destroyed over the last three hundred plus years.”

Yeah – “they” can trace his ancestry back to the supposed “First Slave” without any discernible records.

Kinda like his current biography.

Listen, if we’re supposed to believe this crock of BS based on the flimsiest of conjecture, I see absolutely no idea why we can’t believe whatever story we can concoct on our side about “who” Obama is, based on the same lack of records…..

Hey guys…
This is a good thing. If Obama is descended from the first slave, well then our very own Scott Brown is also related to the first slave. I mean, Obama and Brown share a common ancestor riiiight? ;-p

Remember this?
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2010/01/29/all-in-the-family-obama-related-to-scott-brown/

The Brown campaign should run with that!

    Valerie in reply to p.r.o.t.o. | July 31, 2012 at 2:48 pm

    My grandfather’s family name was Brown. That makes me related to Obama!

      p.r.o.t.o in reply to Valerie. | July 31, 2012 at 4:17 pm

      We are ALL related to Obama. He is the Patriarch. He is our Dear Father, our Dear Leader. And we live in his land. The new Father Land!!

Midwest Rhino | July 31, 2012 at 12:34 pm

Even if true, it means Obama has one 16,384th slave blood. What did the other 16,383 great grandfathers have their hands in? His African grandfather was linked to slave traders, as I recall. In any case, that lineage mostly stayed in Africa. I think one grandfather bought his wife as a slave from Muslims, so that would be a closer connection to both a slave and a slave owner.

The genetic link was found (by rhyme) on his mother’s side, so what of the other 8191 other great (to the 11th) grandparents on that side. They were almost all white, so almost certainly were full of treachery, enslaving and abusing thousands. Does Obama get any credit for that? Will anyone search? We know Warren’s trail of tears Indian lore took a nasty turn when facts revealed her connection to those holding the guns.

Of course when all the great grandparents by rhyme are included, the whole of the white and black population of North America is included. The estimated population of the thirteen colonies in 1630 is only 4700, and 51,000 in 1650. In 1640, almost everyone was an Obama grandparent, and our grandparents too.

But the best news here is that we white people will be allowed to share in the slavery reparations, as long as we can show some tenuous one 16,384th bloodline. Unfortunately, it is harder for those of us with German heritage to rhyme our last names with Punch or Bunch.

Juba Doobai! | July 31, 2012 at 12:40 pm

Obama is so whipped that he wants his own slave blood just to prove he’s got slave cred.

The irony of the Punch slave story is that if Punch was the first slave, his owner was a black guy who went to court to assert his right to Punch’s services in perpetuity.

The good thing about this story is that it reveals blacks were just like the whites who came to America: everyone was indentured labour serving for about seven years or so then set free. Until Punch and the black guy who took him to court and set America on the path to true slavery.

“We have two of the most significant Africans in our country’s history being directly related to each other,” Joseph Shumway, an Ancestry.com genealogist.

Wait. What? I thought we’ve been lectured that President Obama is an American. Is he African now (or whenever politically convenient)?

If his genealogy is also linked to President Bush and Governor Palin, then they, too, are related to the first slave? And, if so, then he’s presumably the third president linked to him which means that this is, without a doubt, not news.

Midwest Rhino | July 31, 2012 at 12:42 pm

Oh, and I’m sure ancestry.com has not considered the marketing advantage of claiming their records can substantiate such claims. heh

He’s got less than a 1% chance of having ANY of that dudes genetic material, even if the story is correct.

And how did they do a Y chromosome based check? Look at the PDF, there’s not a male in the lineage until the mid 1800s.

So who will really care?

TrooperJohnSmith | July 31, 2012 at 12:48 pm

Don’t dig too deep and fill in too many missing blanks, you self-promoting Lefties. Otherwise, you’re liable to end up with ‘proof’ that Obama is his own illegal-alien uncle.

Oopsie. 😐

“We have met the enemy, and he is us! — Pogo, ca 1972

Oh yeah, my past is bigger than your past, Obama! I’m related to the first cell that ever split into two.

Henry Hawkins | July 31, 2012 at 1:04 pm

C’mon, people. Be reasonable. This is a ‘composite’ genealogy.

November 1, 2012 NYT headline: Barack Obama Ancestry Traced Back To Jesus Christ AND Mohammed.

Is there anything about Chicago Jesus that is NOT fabricated?

    TrooperJohnSmith in reply to logos. | July 31, 2012 at 2:51 pm

    This doesn’t quite square with the old southside Chicago legend that states Ma and Pa Dunham were on their front porch in Kansas one night, when they saw what they thought was a meteor. Well, the thing whooshed over the house, knocked over the family-size statue of Lenin in the front yard and crashed into the herb garden.

    Far from being a meteor, it was the remains of a very sophisticated rocket, but not one you’d ever imagine coming from Earth. No, this one was covered in strange writing and inside, was a baby, wrapped in a copy of what appeared to be the Communist Manifesto.

    “Weeeeeel doggies!” exclaimed Pa.

    “Get to it, old man!” said Ma, her voice edgy with anticipation.

    While Pa was cutting the baby free of the wreckage, Ma found a letter, in English, that had been thrown clear, along with a bottle of nice Chablis and a basket of watercress sandwiches.

    In her halting, Kansas twang, she began to read, “My name is George Soros, and I live on the ailing planet of Europa in the Progresso System. I have been looking for a friendly planet to where I can send my son, Kal El, or as they call him at the corner store, Barack Hussein Obama.

    “This has not been an easy decision for me, because you see, everything thing I do is, well, shady. But that’s beside the point…”

How about we trace Obama’s college transcripts, and stuff like why he has the Connecticut social security number of a dead guy, before going off into speculative and meaningless tangents about possible remote ancestors.

Obama is related to slave “John Punch” because the last name sound’s like Obama’s mother’s ancestor “Bunch.”

Uh-huh.

And with evidence like that, I could determine he’s related to Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby and Cindy, too.

    JackRussellTerrierist in reply to jimg. | July 31, 2012 at 2:13 pm

    ‘Obama is related to slave “John Punch” because the last name sound’s like Obama’s mother’s ancestor “Bunch.”’

    Bullshit. It’s what’s for lunch.

The attached profile of Barrage is just as true as Ancestry.com’s tree.

http://1776nation.com/

Thanks to the failed policies and business-bashing actions of OBOZO and his dictatorial regime, the American economy is no longer on life support – it is stone cold dead. Rigor mortis has passed and the economy has now become just a decaying, stinking corpse. In spite of this, bailout bernanke, to justify his massive salary and humongous benefits, continues to provide mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to this rotting pile. All that is doing is creating asset and bond bubbles which help his Wall Street masters reap massive profits, but which also will inevitably collapse causing equally massive harm to the poor and middle class. Even with bailout bernanke’s desperate and potentially harmful actions, the labor force participation rate – the most significant measure of US employment – continues to decline and is now at nearly a 40 YEAR LOW, while “disability” claims and food stamp recipients are at an all time high.

If bailout bernanke and the feckless Fed really wanted to help the US economy (which they don’t – they just want BILLION DOLLAR profits for Big Banks and Wall Street), they would do what the rest of us must do: defeat OBOZO and elect Romney.”Genealogists’ Shock Claim: Obama Is Likely a Decedent of the First American Slave (Through His Mother!”
…and you know that has got to be true – these genealogists are the same bunch that “proved” that “lying sacaja sh^t” warren is 1/32 cherokee.

[…] » Of course, Obama related to first black slave on his, um, mother’s side – Le·gal In·sur… […]

Okay, what’s the name of the cookbook?

No cookbook yet, but you can buy 64 Obie sauces to marinate your 2 days old puppy on PunchBunch.com.

pilgrim1949 | July 31, 2012 at 3:16 pm

Aw, and here all the time we’ve been laborin’ under the misunderstandin’ that this fine lad has been a distant, yet noble son of the Emerald Isle, especially given his bodacious gift o’ the Blarney that he’s been spreadin’ far and wide (and deep!).

‘Tis a cryin’ shame, ’tis, to lose such a fine upstandin’ son of Erin.

*sigh*

Pass me another pint to drown m’ sorrows.

“[A] lot of pieces of circumstantial evidence pointed at John Punch as the only logical candidate who could fit as this African American ancestor,” of the Bunch family said Shumway, and

“[A] lot of pieces of circumstantial evidence pointed at John Punch’s slave owner Loony as the only logical candidate who could fit as Romney’s ancestor…

Punch, Bunch; Loony, Romney; Cherokee, Warrenkee.

One more thing: Punch eventually travelled to Great Britain and founded the Punch Magazine, and created Punch & Judy.
Glove Puppet Punch was the only logical candidate who could fit as Sock Puppet Shumway’s ancestor.

    BannedbytheGuardian in reply to elkh1. | August 1, 2012 at 2:44 am

    hehe. Punch & Judy just had its 400th anniversary. in England.Originally an Italian travelling show.

Translation: Anybody who doesn’t want the descendant of America’s first African slave to be President is a racist.

We owe Barry the Presidency.

JimMtnViewCaUSA | July 31, 2012 at 3:46 pm

Since the biggest number of black slaves were owned by other Africans in Africa itself, Obama is likely to be related to a slave owner from his father’s side.

    Juba Doobai! in reply to JimMtnViewCaUSA. | July 31, 2012 at 8:43 pm

    Eh, sorry, by Arabs in Africa. The slaves were made so by the Muslims who, though black considered themselves ethnically Arabs, in the same way Obama is actually Arab and not African on his “father’s” side. They receive their ethnicity through the line of the father, hence the reason for rape by genocide in Darfur.

      JackRussellTerrierist in reply to Juba Doobai!. | August 1, 2012 at 2:34 pm

      ….which is why obastard can only be related to a slave through his mother’s side.

      What a cryin’ crock of horseshit (meaning the blog story, not what you said).

WOW! Punch, eh?

“Hawaiian” born, that would make him A Hawaiian Punch, right? Uhh, I mean, Left?

Since Elizabeth Warren was mentioned..

Love this headline, from abc.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/elizabeth-warren-open-bill-clinton-democratic-convention/story?id=16891653#.UBg3uGFiqN0

Elizabeth Warren to open for Bill Clinton at Democratic convention

Couldn’t help myself, jus’ hadta..

So did Monica Lewinsky, just not at a “convention”, that I know of. Question of the day, will Lizzy be attired as a Cherokee woman?

    JimMtnViewCaUSA in reply to JP. | July 31, 2012 at 4:13 pm

    I would give a lot to have the time, proximity and balls to sneak into the convention, then whip off my smock and rush the stage dressed as a Cherokee when Liz comes on stage 🙂

      BannedbytheGuardian in reply to JimMtnViewCaUSA. | August 1, 2012 at 2:49 am

      Do you remember the episode when Lucy got learnt Ricky was singing an Indian love song duet with said dressed singer?

      Lucy somehow got her fired between shows & snuck in herself dressed as indian lady. Then she had to sing…..

“use clues to cobble together some of the facts . .”

In the military we call that a WAG.

Wild A$$ed Guess.

[…] Somewhere In the Wastes of the Obama Economy Posted on July 31, 2012 1:30 pm by Bill Quick » Of course, Obama related to first black slave on his, um, mother’s side – Le·gal In·sur… Et tu, Ancestry.com? Why have you sold your integrity by “cobbling” together facts, making […]

I was referred to [email protected] by Ancestry.com to lodge a complaint about the outrageous statements by an Ancestry.com genealogist, Joseph Shumway to a national audience. I would encourage others to write as well and tell them to stay out of politics. Not all their customers are Democrat. I have been a member for years and irritated beyond words at this behavior.

BannedbytheGuardian | August 1, 2012 at 2:58 am

I am gonna give youse a bunch

I am gonna give youse a punch .

The British have had many dialects & evolvements in English & have had remarkably few civil wars -even the Scots have been on board since 1600. I think they know B from P.

Besides I thought he already had the Black vote & the white guilt vote.

He needs the Hispanic .I think they should have squeezed in a direct descendant of Columbus & Aztec Princess. That should have covered both sides of the South American race divide.

If it’s already been demonstrated that Obama is related to the Bush family, wouldn’t this new piece of the puzzle mean that George H. W. Bush was the first African American president?

grimreapermike | August 1, 2012 at 3:39 pm

He is probably kin to the original one in the woodpile.