CNN 2012-08-02

 President Obama's story is well known. His father from Kenya, his mother from the United States, but ancestry¹.com says it has mapped out the Obama family tree going back 11 generations, with stunning² 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 perfectly³ plausible⁴, because there was a time when white indentured⁵ 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 Mitt⁶ Romney's morbid⁷ 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?”

1 ancestry   

n.祖先，家世

参考例句：

• Their ancestry settled the land in 1856.他们的祖辈1856年在这块土地上定居下来。
• He is an American of French ancestry.他是法国血统的美国人。

2 stunning   

adj.极好的；使人晕倒的

参考例句：

• His plays are distinguished only by their stunning mediocrity.他的戏剧与众不同之处就是平凡得出奇。
• The finished effect was absolutely stunning.完工后的效果非常美。

3 perfectly   

adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
• Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。

4 plausible   

adj.似真实的，似乎有理的，似乎可信的

参考例句：

• His story sounded plausible.他说的那番话似乎是真实的。
• Her story sounded perfectly plausible.她的说辞听起来言之有理。

5 indentured   

v.以契约束缚（学徒）( indenture的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The Africans became indentured servants, trading labor for shelter and eventual freedom. 非洲人成为契约上的仆人，以劳力交换庇护及最终的自由。 来自互联网
• They are descendants of indentured importees. 他们是契约外来工的后代。 来自互联网

6 mitt   

n.棒球手套，拳击手套，无指手套；vt.铐住，握手

参考例句：

• I gave him a baseball mitt for his birthday.为祝贺他的生日，我送给他一只棒球手套。
• Tom squeezed a mitt and a glove into the bag.汤姆把棒球手套和手套都塞进袋子里。

7 morbid   

adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的

参考例句：

• Some people have a morbid fascination with crime.一些人对犯罪有一种病态的痴迷。
• It's morbid to dwell on cemeteries and such like.不厌其烦地谈论墓地以及诸如此类的事是一种病态。