POLITICS: African Americans in My White Family Tree

Because  my  family  tree   --  my  "pedigree  chart"  family  tree  showing  lineal  ancestors,  only,  namely  2  parents,  4  grandparents,  8  great  grandparents,  16  great  great  grandparents,  and  so  on  --  has  been  extremely  well  researched  by  others,  I  am  able  to  actually  name  virtually  all  of  my  ancestors  back  4  generations,  and  in  the  case  of  a  few  family  lines,  running  through  certain  Mayflower  passengers  to  royal  ancestry,  I  can  go  back   about  1,000  years,  with  respectable  reliability.   (To  a  certain  extent,  the  Pilgrim  families  represented  descendants  of  dispossessed  royalty,  and  because  royal  pedigree  was  so  jealously   protected  and  fought-over  in  Europe,  including  by  the  law,    royal  pedigree   ended-up   being  fairly  well  documented  and  well  established   in  Europe.)   About  one-fifth  of  the  population  of  the  United  States  has  been  subsumed  into  the  "descendancy  cone"   of  at  least  one  of  the  Pilgrims.     I  and  my  brothers  and  sisters  and  our  cousins  on  our  mother's  side  are  lucky  enough  to  have  been  subsumed  into  the  distinct  descendancy  cones  of  four  (4)   of  the  occupants  of  the  Mayflower,  which  gives  us  four  (4)  good  shots  at  being  a  descendant  of  one  of  the  extremely-well-established  descendancy  cones   of  European  royalty.

I  also  had  my  DNA  tested  by  Ancestry.com.

The  results  only  confirm  what  is  on  my  pedigree  chart,  except  that  one  of  the  unknowns  --  a  great  great  grandfather   surnamed  "Fuller"   who  was  probably  a  Protestant  Northern  Irelander  living  in  Londonderry  --   turns  out  to  have  been   a  very  "purebred"  Scandinavian,  not  a  "Scotch  Irishman"  as  family  legend  predicted.   And,  lo  and  behold,  Londonderry  had  a  Scandinavian  quarter  capable  of  generating  such  a  walking  bundle  of  Nordic  chromosomes.

Relevant  to  this  article,    it  is  solidly  Caucasian,  all  of  the  way  back.  That  includes  some European  Jewish  stock,   some  European  Mediterranean  stock,    some  Finno-Ugric  stock  and  some   Turko-Caucasoids  from  the  Middle  East.

But  none  of  it  leads  to  Africa.

That's  on  the  PEDIGREE  chart --  the  chart  of  parents,   grand  parents,  great  (or  "G1")   grandparents,  G2  grandparents,  G3  grandparents,  and  so  on  back  into  the  mists  of  time.

However,   on  the  NON-PEDIGREE  FAMILY  chart  --  the  chart  showing  not  just  the  "lineals,"  the  line  of  direct  ancestors  who  gave  me  their  genes,   but  also  the  "non-lineal  consanguines,"   the  lines  of  those  humans  who  are  descendants   of  a  lineal  --   more  and  more  African  American   blood  cousins,  or  in  my  case  African  Americans   sharing  one  of  the  white  ancestors  in  my  pedigree  chart  as  one  of  his  or  her  ancestors,   are  showing  up.

Me

African-American  distant  cousin,

according  to  DNA  results

African-American  distant  cousin,

according  to  DNA  results

African-American  distant  cousin,

according  to  DNA  results

African-American  distant  cousin,

according  to  DNA  results

African-American  distant  cousin,

according  to  DNA  results

So  far,   Ancestry.com  is  showing  5  living  people  who  had  their  DNA  tested  who  are  African  American  and  my  distant  cousins.

And  if  5  are  actually  showing,  because  only  about  1  in  10   people  who  get  their  DNA  tested  post  their  photos  with  their  results   then  there  are  probably   about   50  within  the actual  results.

And  since  only  a  tiny  percentage  of  the  American  people  have  had  their  DNA  tested  by  Ancestry.com,  the  total   number  of  blacks  who  are  distant  blood  cousins   can  probably  safely  be  multiplied   by  100,  and  not  be  an  exaggeration  at  all.

In  other  words,   statistically,  I  and  my  brothers  and  sisters  probably  have  a  good  5,000  African  American  blood  cousins.

There  is  a  pattern  in  the  results.

Ancestry.com   restricts  all  such  cousins,  so  far,  to  the  5th-to-8th  cousin  level  of  relationship.

That  means  that  the  white  ancestor  which  I  and  my  African  American  cousin  have  in  common   was   a   G4  to  G7  grandparent.

At  least  two  of  the  families  who  comprise  "lineals"  in  my  pedigree  chart  were  "respectable  Southern  slave  owners"  --  the  Pitman's,  and  the  Snapp's,  all  of  them  G-4s,  G-5s,  G-6s  or  G-7s.

Members  of  one  of  both  of  those  families,  apparently,   engaged  in  sex  with  and  begot   cousins  with  slaves  or  with  emancipated  descendants  of  slaves.

One  of  my  African-American  cousins  pictured  above,  without  realizing  the  significance  of  his  action,   even  managed  to  connect  himself   as  a  matter  of  documentation  with  the  unusually-named  Snapp  line.

When  I  first  saw  this,  I  felt  good  about  my  connection  to  the  Family  of  Man  at  Large  via   my  African  American  cousins.  I  assumed  that  the  undeniable  sexual  connection  between  my  white  ancestor  and  a  slave  or  an  emancipated  slave  or  a  descendant  of  a  slave  was  consensual.

But,  today,  after  I  read  an  article  about  rape  by  soldiers  in  the  Civil  War ...

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/rape-and-justice-in-the-civil-war/

... it  suddenly  dawned  on  me  that  things  may  not  have  been  so  consensual  between  white  ancestor  and  African  American.

Hmmmmm.  Hmmmmm.

No  matter  what,   friends,  remember  that  God  doesn't  see  color  when  He  judges.

All  He  asks  is,  What  did  YOU  do  with  the  time   I  gave  you  on  Earth ?