However, if you go far enough in any person's ancestry--including my own--there will be some embarrassing facts to be found.
Apparently, such is the case with Barack Obama. On Obama's mother's side, there are a couple of Southern forebears who owned slaves.
From the Chicago Tribune, free registration required:
(Apparently this story comes from a Tribune Company publication, The Baltimore Sun.)
According to the research, one of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 Census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.
The Sun retraced much of Reitwiesner's work, using Census information available on the Web site ancestry.com and documents retrieved by the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, among other sources. The records show that Overall, then 30, owned a 15-year-old black female and a 25-year-old black male, while Mary Duvall, his mother-in-law, owned a 60-year-old black man and a 58-year-old black woman. (Slaves are listed in the 1850 Census by owner, age, "sex," and "colour," not by name.)
The same article reports that two other presidential contenders, John Edwards and John McCain, are also desecended from slave owners.
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