According to Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak’s tweet this morning, she has been “researching Michelle Obama’s roots for a while.” The research began to come to light today in an article published in the October 7, 2009 Politics section of the New York Times. Pretty good stuff… The online article includes an interactive section that allows the user to view the actual documents for the first lady’s family – complete with highlighting and transcriptions. (warning – I wasn’t able to use the back key after viewing the documents). There is also a cool interactive family tree posted at the site. Following is a teaser.
WASHINGTON — In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.
In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of nearly two centuries.
In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, marked the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.
Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.
