What an amazing find. Many southerners have black relatives. It’s just a fact of life. For many of us, just the slavery issue is difficult. I don’t think I have white guilt because I didn’t own slaves. I don’t think I have white guilt over killing Indians either. I didn’t kill any Indians. However, not personalizing the guilt doesn’t mean that we don’t wish things had been different.–very different.
In the case of Michelle Obama’s ancestors, the white relatives don’t really know if the union was concensual, forced, or “dutiful.” None of the choices are good. Of course, they will never know. That’s a pretty difficult thing to have to acknowledge.
Do you have any discoveries in your family tree? My latest discovery was Secretariat’s owner on my mother’s side(not close) and one of the women in the White House press corp is my 2nd cousin once removed on my father’s side. My mother’s family has been blessed with a non-relative who is a fabulous genealogist. His wife is a very distant cousin.He just got interested in the family. We all have a Facebook page and have reacquainted and stayed in touch there. Most recently we have shared pictures that have landed in our possession. My mother had a sister who died before my mother was born, during the great influenza epidemic. Frances was less than 2 years old. My grandmother cried every time she thought about her, probably until the day she died. I never saw but 1 picture of her. To our discovery, my grandparents must have given my grandfather’s siblings pictures of baby Frances because our 2nd cousins have all posted various pictures of Frances as a toddler. What a neat discovery.
On a sad note, my brothers and I lost many irreplaceable photos of our parents and grandparents because of the fire I told you all about. The fire brother was our family genealogist. We entrusted him with it, quite naturally. All the originals are gone in that fire, including a daguerreotype picture of our troll-like ggg grandparents who died right before the civil war started. Fortunately, that had been scanned but the original is gone. Suggestion: scan and cloud all your pictures that are irreplaceable.
Very interesting. I dated a guy who was very invested in his native american history because it was “tangible”, unlike his lineage to slavery. Before that experience, I had just simply taken for granted that my history could be easily tracked.