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ROOTS: Michelle Obama as first lady and (inset) as a baby with her parents

US FIRST lady Michelle Obama’s roots have been traced back to a six-year-old slave girl, who was among ‘possessions’ left by a white plantation owner to his daughter and son-in-law.

The New York Times, which discovered the link along with genealogist Megan Smolenyak, reported that she was described simply as ‘negro girl Melvinia’ in owner David Patterson’s will, and was valued at US$475 soon after his death.

The Times said Melvinia, whose parents were listed as ‘unknown’, is the great-great-great-grandmother of Michelle Obama, who, with husband President Barack Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia, did an emotional tour of Cape Coast Castle, a former slavery outpost in Ghana, in July.

The discovery confirmed Mrs Obama’s family’s direct link to slavery, and also pieced together her family’s five-generation journey from bondage to the White House and her husband’s history-making presidency, the Times said.

Mrs. Obama’s family history came from 19th century probate records, old marriage licences, photographs and memories of elderly women who remember the family.

In 1852, after Patterson’s death, Melvinia was ripped away from all she knew in South Carolina and shipped to a 200-acre farm in Georgia, owned by her new masters, Patterson’s daughter and son-in-law, Christianne and Henry Shields.

There, she worked in both the house and the fields, the newspaper said.

At 15, she gave birth to a son named Dolphus, after becoming pregnant by a white man in circumstances that remain unclear, Smolenyak said.

Historians said it would be difficult to determine whether Melvinia’s pregnancy was the result of rape or consensual sex.

“No one should be surprised anymore to hear about the number of rapes and the amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery; it was an everyday experience,” Jason A. Gillmer, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University, told the Times.

“But we do find that some of these relationships can be very complex,” added Gillmer, who has researched liaisons between slave owners and slaves.

Melvinia had three more mixed-race children. Records showed that after slavery she moved to the Alabama border. Her first child, Dolphus, married Alice Easley, Michelle Obama's great-great-grandmother.

Dolphus and Alice soon migrated to Birmingham, Alabama. Dolphus, who married four times, was a carpenter who soon owned a booming business, records show.

One of his grandsons, painter Purnell Shields, who was Michelle Obama's grandfather, moved his family to Chicago.

Historians have said that the first lady’s heritage is reflective of America’s complex racial history. “She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, historian and author of Slaves in the Family.

“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America. We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.”

Published: 11 October 2009
Issue: 1393

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