WHEN HE drew up his will in 1850, the owner of First Lady Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandmother Melvinia valued the six-year-old slave girl at $475.
Mrs Obama's ancestry, as researched by genealogist Megan Smolenyak and the New York Times, shows again the extraordinary mixed-race legacy of the United States.
In March 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama referred to his wife’s heritage. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners,” he said.
But until yesterday, when the New York Timespublished its research, the presence of a white man in Michelle Obama's family tree was merely a family rumour.
Ms Smolenyak is the genealogist who discovered Mr Obama’s roots in Co Offaly. She has now confirmed Mrs Obama’s white ancestry, which may also be Irish. When she learned that Michelle Obama’s mother’s maiden name was Shields, she was fascinated, because her own mother is a Shields from Co Antrim.
Before he died, the plantation owner David Patterson itemised Melvinia along with material belongings and left her to his married daughter Christianne and her husband Henry Shields. The child was torn from whatever family she had in South Carolina and shipped to Georgia.
About the age of 15, Melvinia bore her first child, who was named Dolphus Shields. Slaves often took the names of their owners, and the surname is not necessarily a confirmation of paternity. Whether Mrs Obama’s great-great-grandfather was the result of rape or coercion is uncertain, but his unknown father was white. In the old photograph published by the New York Times, Dolphus Shields looks white. He died in 1950, 14 years before the birth of his descendant, the First Lady.
Ms Smolenyak says: “It’s a good first guess” that a man from the Shields family fathered Dolphus, perhaps Charles, one of Christianne and Henry Shields’s sons. “In the 1870 census, they were living smack next door to each other,” she explains. The same census listed three of Melvinia’s four children as mulatto.
“The people who are descended from that Shields family all point back to Ireland, but no particular location in Ireland,” Ms Smolenyak says.
The genealogist dismisses a US website report that Mrs Obama’s ancestor was an Irish-American slave-owner from Ballyshiel, Co Offaly. “If Michelle is part Irish, and there’s a decent chance she is, it would take more proving,” she says. “We’re probably talking back in the 1700s.”