Using DNA To Trace Michelle Obama’s Past
Friday, January 3, 2014
Below is an article from Ancestry.com. It proves that Michelle Obama has some white ancestors. The article reads as follows:
First Lady Michelle Obama always suspected that she had white ancestors. But she had no idea who they were. With DNA testing and research,
I was able to solve that mystery and finally identify the white
forbears who had remained hidden in her family tree for more than a
century.
All across the country, growing numbers of people are
turning to DNA testing as a tool to help unlock the secrets of their
roots, using companies such as ancestry.com, among others. When I
started researching my new book, “American Tapestry: The Story of the
Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama,’’ I pored over
historical documents that I found in local archives, courthouses and
libraries as well as records that I found online on ancestry.com and
other state and local databases. But I knew that DNA testing would be
the only way to unearth the truth.
I suspected that Mrs. Obama’s white ancestors belonged to the white
Shields family that had owned her great-great-great grandmother,
Melvinia Shields. So I persuaded several descendants of the black and
white Shields to do DNA testing.
The results showed that the two
families were related. The DNA testing indicated that Melvinia’s owner’s
son was the likely father of Melvinia’s biracial child, Dolphus
Shields. (Dolphus Shields is the first lady’s great-great grandfather.)
This
was painful news for many of the Shields descendants. They knew that
that Melvinia might have been raped and that their kinship originated
during slavery, one of the darkest chapters of our history.
But
last month, members of both sides of the family – black and white — put
aside the pain of the past. They got together for the very first time in
Rex, Georgia at a ceremony to commemorate Melvinia’s life. They swapped
family stories, posed for photographs, exchanged phone numbers and had a
meal together.
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