Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

John Punch to bunches of Bunch to Stanley Ann Dunham .. bits ..

"In 1640, Mr. Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment — servitude for life — was harsher than what the white servants received, and it has led some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery."

[...]

"“What makes the John Punch case interesting is here is a guy who is definitely a slave,” said
Professor Berlin, who did not participate in the examination of the president’s ancestors."

[...]

The Ancestry.com group traced two major Bunch family branches, one that lived as white and stayed in Virginia for generations and another that left for the Carolinas. In North Carolina, the Bunches were recorded as “mulatto” in early records, and their descendants are also the president’s cousins.

[...]

“The odds, based on what does actually survive, strongly suggest that President Barack Obama is a descendant (he would be the 11th great-grandson) of the first enslaved African in America,” Ms. Harman and her team wrote in a research paper that Ancestry.com intended to release on its Web site .. http://www.ancestry.com/obama .. on Monday.

your link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/obamas-mother-had-african-forebear-study-suggests.html?_r=1

Thanks, F6 .. re the video, this morning i forgot to start from my SF root ..