Patience
Mentor
Joined: 13 Mar 2007
{Posts: 261 }
Location: Canada
|
 Posted: Tue 24 Apr 2007 18:48 Post subject: Families find ties that surprise |
 |
|
| Quote: | Families find ties that surprise
Modern technology Tuesday, April 24, 2007NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
Family rumor explained the tawny-toned skin of David Reynolds' great-grandmother with a tale of Cherokee ancestry.
Except for the occasional mention of her Native American blood, no one really talked about Sarah Frances Pierce Sisk. Growing up, Reynolds, 51, never set eyes on a photograph of his mother's grandmother. He barely knew her name.
But four years ago, after more than 20 years of digging around his family tree, Reynolds unearthed the family secret with a few clicks of his computer mouse. His great-grandmother was no Cherokee woman. She was part black. Then DNA tests confirmed that the white Oregonian was, too.
A dual revolution is fueling such discoveries among a growing number of white Americans. A boom in online genealogical sites and the advent of inexpensive DNA tests -- as little as $99 -- have combined to reveal unsuspected details of family history. Geneticists say as much as 10 percent of Americans who identify as white have African ancestry. Biologists and historians alike say the increasing discovery of kinship ties across color lines could start to shift the country's attitudes on race.
"This makes me one-sixteenth black," Reynolds says, "certainly no huge amount. But I think it tends to break down the whole us-versus-them mentality."
In February, a historian for Ancestry.com revealed that Al Sharpton's ancestors were owned by the ancestors of Strom Thurmond, who ran for president on a segregationist ticket. Sharpton is seeking a DNA test to check for a blood tie. DNA testing also showed that a male from Thomas Jefferson's family -- historians say likely Jefferson himself -- fathered at least one child with an enslaved black woman, Sally Hemings.
Like most who take a serious interest in genealogy, Reynolds will tell you that those who tramp around in the past must be willing to run into surprises. Even so, Reynolds says, coming across black ancestors was unexpected. Though it did explain something. Reynolds flings a mass of spiraling gray locks from his shoulder and says, "I know where I got my curly hair from now."
Reynolds is a bear of a man with ruddy skin who grew up in what he calls "suburban-white-bread" Oregon City. Race, Reynolds says, "was not something that even entered my mind."
Still, Reynolds remembers hearing about his great-grandmother. "I assume the reason that it got talked about at all was the fact that the older generation in the family knew she was quite dark-complected," Reynolds says.
After Reynolds' parents died in the '80s, the youngest of eight children decided he wanted to learn more about his family's history.
Back then, genealogy meant slogging through rolls and rolls of microfilm and heading to dusty courthouses in tiny towns. Still, Reynolds managed to plot much of his family's past.
By the late '90s, companies began compiling documents such as census, birth, military and death records on Internet databases. Searches that once took years could be completed in days. Yet his research on great-grandma Sisk kept leading to dead ends.
The eureka moment came while Reynolds attended a Portland genealogy convention in 2000. One of the speakers said that if researchers were stumped, they should abandon their assumptions.
Reynolds entered his great-grandmother's name in Ancestry.com, instantly searching millions of records. But he stopped thinking she was part Native American and that the birth date on her marriage license was correct.
Doors opened. His great-grandmother's mother had been the daughter of Church and Ellen Tipton, a black man and woman born into slavery. Church Tipton had served in the Union Army as a corporal.
The discovery took Reynolds' breath away. In the past, even a part-black great-grandmother would have made Reynolds black. By tradition -- or written into law in some states -- America's "one-drop rule" cast a person with any amount of black blood out of the white race.
It should not come as a surprise that white Americans have black family ties, says historian T.J. Davis of Arizona State University. People have been mixing across racial lines since both Africans and Europeans landed on these shores in the early 1600s.
In early America, white and black indentured servants were allowed to, and did, intermarry. With the rise of slavery, blackness became codified in large part because of the rampant sexual exploitation of enslaved black women by white men. The children of these unions, and anyone else with discernable black features or a known black relative, became black no matter how much European blood they had.
Around the time of the Civil War, the U.S. Census listed more than 600,000 mulattos -- an archaic term for children with both a black and a white parent. Yet for white Americans to acknowledge black ancestry has remained a taboo.
"White people have been willing and want to claim some Native American ancestry," Davis says. "but seldom if ever, will someone voluntarily say, 'I have African ancestry.' "
Such tests reveal "genetic admixture," which looks for certain genetic markers that denote ancestry from distinct geographic locations.
Mark Shriver, who runs a DNA-testing program at Penn State University, and evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves Jr. of North Carolina A&T University, say as much as 10 percent of the white population has some African ancestry, depending on the region of the country. In the Northwest, for example, white people are more likely to find African ancestry than some other parts of the country, Graves says, but the percentage of African ancestry in the typical white person will be quite small. That is because with fewer black people in the population, black people were more likely to marry white people.
Their offspring would also marry white people, and so on, diluting the African ancestry but spreading it among more descendants.
Many people of mixed racial heritage, such as Reynolds' great-grandmother, passed into white society, despite the one-drop rule. On census records from 1900 until her death in 1940, his great-grandmother is listed as white.
The relatively low number of white people finding African DNA doesn't fully demonstrate the link between black and white families. Geneticists are finding that on average black Americans' ancestry is about 20 percent European. In Seattle, the average European ancestry among black people is 35 percent, according to Shriver. More telling, DNA tests show that one-quarter to one-third of black males who trace their direct male line of descent --their father's father's father's line back through history -- will come up with a European ancestor, not an African one.
For each black person with European ancestry, a white family out there somewhere is kin. And these days, families are more likely than ever to be contacted by a relative on the other side of the color line.
That's what Reynolds did after finding Church and Ellen Tipton. He tracked down Fred Tipton, one of the black descendants of Church and Ellen Tipton and his mother's second cousin, through a genealogy Web site.
Although some in his immediate family weren't too pleased to learn they had black kin, Reynolds found himself intrigued. "I had ancestors who were slave owners; now I have ancestors who were slaves," Reynolds explains. "In the abstract, slavery is a despicable thing. But to find out that you have direct ancestors that were held as slaves and treated as cattle, really drives the point home in a personal way."
Tipton wasn't shocked to discover that he had a white relative. His light-skinned grandfather used to pass for white on occasion. Tipton, a 60-year-old musician living in Vermont, says he was just happy to know that a white person could learn of black ancestry and not have a problem with it.
He sent Reynolds a photograph of their shared ancestors, Church and Ellen Tipton, Tipton's great-great-grandparents.
"I open it up," Reynolds says with a diminutive smile. "And said, 'Wow. She's beautiful.' "
His dark-skinned great-great-great-grandmother, he says, is one of the best-looking members of his family.
Nikole Hannah-Jones: 503-294-5968; nhannahjones@news.oregonian.com
|
|
|
'
FAQ
Search
Register
Log in
