This is a lightly updated version of an article I wrote last year for the genealogy-technology blog, Genealogy’s Star, when the news media renewed questions into Elizabeth Warren’s genealogy. Before you start reading, remember that this is a history blog, with occasional forays into the field of genealogy. Although it is the middle of an election year, don’t even think of making political comments! If you do, they will be gleefully deleted. Comments are welcome on the topics addressed in the post.
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Okay, so genealogy is always an issue in presidential politics. Campaigns lend themselves to questions of parentage, lineage, paternity, and race. Was Andrew Jackson biracial? Was Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather African American? Did Grover Cleveland father a child when he was a bachelor, justifying the famous chant, “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? Gone to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha!”?
During the last presidential election, mention was sometimes made of Mitt Romney’s polygamous heritage, a topic I addressed in the article, “A Brief Guide to Mitt Romney’s Polygamous Heritage,” but attempts to racialize a white Mormon were largely non-starters since he was running against an African American with much closer polygamous ancestry.
Six months ahead of the 2016 presidential election, genealogical questions continue to provide fodder for the news outlets.
In what looks to be an ongoing political battle, one of the candidates for president just renewed questions about Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim of Native American heritage.
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Elizabeth Warren was born in Oklahoma, and she grew up with stories of Cherokee and Delaware heritage (Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance, 5, 236). During her 2012 campaign for her seat in the Senate, her rival, Scott Brown, made as-yet-unproven allegations that she did not actually have Native American ancestry but had used the designation to qualify for affirmative action.
A few points for when stories like this do show up in the media.
1. The media doesn’t do genealogy well.
Most of the stories about Elizabeth Warren’s heritage don’t even bother to check her genealogy. A notable exception is Garance Franke-Ruta’s article in The Atlantic, “Is Elizabeth Warren Native American or What?”
2. Genealogists don’t necessarily do genealogy well.
When I first started exploring this question, I found a website that claimed “The Genealogical Evidence Shows Warren Has No Native American Ancestry.” That strongly worded statement was based on a series of blog posts on the blog Thoughts from Polly’s Granddaughter. The author, Twila Barnes, noted, “If one can’t find an ancestor on any of [the reservation] rolls or in any of the records of the Cherokee people, then there is only one logical conclusion – they aren’t Cherokee and they don’t have a Cherokee ancestor.” (Source.)
Barnes’s statement is a logical fallacy. If someone’s ancestor cannot be found on the Cherokee records dating back to 1817, it means he or she cannot file for membership in the tribe. It does not mean there is no Cherokee ancestry, and it most certainly does not rule out all Native American heritage, as the other website claims.
Barnes’s conclusion that “we have gone back about 188 years and still not found a Cherokee” (her italics) does not account for every ancestor in Warren’s family tree. (Source.)
Barnes comes to the conclusion that Warren has no Native American ancestry based on the Cherokee rolls combined with the racial categories listed in the United States Census and a few other government documents. She looks at Warren’s ancestry, primarily the Crawford and Harlin families, and assumes that since all the government documents she can find about the two family lines list their race as white that that means that every member of the family was, in fact, white. That is a fallacious conclusion, considering the history of race and the census in America.
Since it seems her work has largely concentrated on proving Cherokee lineage, she may be excused for not understanding the meaning and use of racial categories in the United States Census and other government documents. There is a good summary of the topic in Jennifer Hochschild and Brenna Powell’s article, “Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850-1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race.” (Harvard University Department of Government, in Studies in American Political Development, Spring 2008.)
An important point about racial categories in government documents: they were often based on the census taker’s perception of the person or community. My current project involves African American genealogy, and I’ve seen many of mixed race “passing” as white and occasionally a Native American listed as black, along with a number of racial errors in government documents. Here is one example of an error.
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Laughlin McLean was listed as black in the 1920 US Census. He was not black; he was white Scots-Irish Canadian; but in 1904 he and his African American fiancée Ellen James had traveled from the northwest to Wyoming to be married since interracial marriage was legal there.
Why did the census list Ellen’s husband as black in the 1920 census? Laughlin may have been absent when the census taker came around to collect the family data, so the census taker may have looked at Ellen, considered that she and Laughlin were living in a largely minority neighborhood in California, and didn’t bother to ask the race of her husband. Alternately, given the times, the clerk who copied the original information may have considered an interracial marriage unlikely and “corrected” the entry. (These are only two of a number of possible reasons for the incorrect information.)
Assuming that government records will include every member of a family and correctly report the race of every member of the family back to the 1820s is not a conclusion that can be supported by the historical record.
Despite the fact that I disagree with Barnes’s methodology and conclusions, I’m not making any conclusions about Warren’s ancestry. Since her family is from Oklahoma and the South, Warren’s ancestry may include African Americans, Native Americans, or may be entirely white European. As Franke-Ruta concluded at The Atlantic, the best way to settle the question would be through DNA testing. “DNA ancestry tests are not dispositive,” she wrote, “and even a positive result would not be useful for tribal affiliation or CDIB [Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood] purposes. But it would silence her critics, and — more importantly — it would help her learn whether what she had spent her life thinking she knew about herself and her family was true.”
And that leads to the third point.
3. How many of our own family stories would stand up to intense media scrutiny?
I am currently working on the story of a family that has been white for the past 150 years, and not only white but stridently and proudly white. As they find that their heritage is multiracial, it sometimes feels like I am sitting on the front row watching a slow-motion train wreck as the descendants grapple with questions of racial identity and history and the meaning of the family stories.
Are you sure that the family stories you tell are accurate? Have you found documentable inaccuracies in your family history, or have you proved your family stories correct? How have you come to terms with discrepancies between fact and legend?
In closing…
These three points lead to an obvious moral: if you’re running for major political office in the United States, hire a reputable professional genealogist to double check the stories you’ll be telling on the campaign trail.
I have found in my family, as often as stories told about ancestry are not true, that some stories are suppressed because of things that make us, a hundred or more years later, feel uncomfortable.
There was considerable angst in my mother’s family regarding English ancestors from the 1700s who had children before they were married. On the other side of my family, we had a cryptic message in an ancestor’s life story that “we will never talk about what happened” that brought a solid middle class family into impoverished circumstances. I have since gotten an oral version of the story from a distant relative in the UK that tells a not uncommon tale of marital infidelity and a broken family.
As we search for information about our ancestry, we should not be surprised that things aren’t always what they seem, and that “truth,” in a historical sense, can be a moving target. An article I published a few years ago contains a retelling of a story from my wife’s family, that now appears to be totally false. It’s a minor part of the story, but nonetheless still not true, no matter how much better the original sounds in the retelling.
The stories of our ancestors still have value as family folklore. The folklore came from somewhere. We had one story where our end of line ancestor was supposedly Pierre Lafitte, the pirate. When he went into hiding, supposedly our ancestor suddenly showed up with a family the same makeup and ages as his. Well, that story was disproved with the first census and a look at Pierre’s history. But it is still fun to say that people kept digging up the property looking for the Lafitte treasure (which may be true if people actually believed the story).
I have also seen how a story can morph just based on how close you are to the original event. One ancestor just had a death date. My dad and his relatives always said they didn’t know how he died, but there were some severe storms in the area around that time, and the James gang was known to be operating around that area (ancestor may have worked for the railroad). Then I found a news blurb.
Ancestor got into a fight with the local sheriff. The national news blurbs immediately after it occurred claimed my ancestor stabbed the sheriff to death and then his friends surrounded my ancestor and shot him to death. I’ve seen that one paragraph blurb in dozens of newspapers across the country in the early 1880s. But then I found out that the sheriff didn’t die until 4 years later. So I dug further.
The closer I came to local news reports the more details came out. Turned out the full story was there was a history of animosity between the two. My ancestor was in town running errands, ran in to the sheriff and his friends, all of whom were drunk, and got into an argument. Sheriff pushed or slapped my ancestor and turned away. My ancestor sliced him with a knife. I’m pretty sure that the crowd being drunk had something to do with the reports that the sheriff died, or the wound seemed to be bad enough at first they assumed he would die. Some of them followed my ancestor round the back of the store where he was getting on his horse. They throw bricks and stones at him and then one of them shot him. He did die. Sheriff was up for reelection the next month. He lost. He was well enough to contest the election results shortly thereafter.
So sometimes the true stories are even more interesting!
This is why I think DNA testing is becoming so popular – and helpful – in doing genealogy. I was tested first and, low and behold, have about 4% African. Before my parents were tested we just assumed it came from my dad’s side as the Moors would frequently travel to Spain taking captives, etc.
Wrong.
It all came from my mother’s side! My Mexican mother whose ancestors as far back as we know are Mexican, Spanish or Indian (mostly Mayan – that family lore did prove right through DNA testing). Family theories are now cropping up (slaves of Spanish conquistadores?). We probably will never know.
On the flip side, my great-great-grandmother had four children but was never married. She never told her children who their fathers were. With DNA testing my dad and I are getting matched up to people whose family surnames don’t match ours at all. I am guessing they are probably from the elusive great-great-grandfather. Someday we hope to be able to definitively identify him by matching all the family trees of those DNA cousins. While those great-great-grandparents cannot be sealed we can at least do his work and then go on from there to seal him to his parents and so on back through the generations.
Thanks for this fascinating post, Ardis. Both my husband and I love genealogy and we enjoy tracking down the truth behind family myths. And yes, sometimes the true stories are more interesting than the whitewashed versions passed down through the generations.
(whispering: This is another one of Amy Tanner Thiriot’s great posts)
My daughter had an entry in our state National History Day competition and we were on the road for a couple of days, so I’m glad Susan made a comment to remind me to come back to this post and thank her, Kevin, CLM, and Montserrat for their thoughtful responses. (And Ardis, as always, for lending me her amazing readers and commenters.)
I agree that the actual stories can be more interesting than the whitewashed version. It’s certainly true in the slave stories I’m researching, but on the other hand, learning that family stories aren’t true or entirely true can be a real problem when a story has become intertwined with a family’s politics and religion and intrinsic identity.