Posted on 04/17/2015 5:02:05 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Ben Affleck asked the producers of PBS’ Finding Your Roots television show to edit out details of an ancestor who owned slaves, according to a Sony internal email exchange leaked this week.
In an email sent to Sony CEO Michael Lynton shortly before the show’s second season premiere, Harvard professor and Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that an unnamed “megastar” had asked producers to “edit out something about one of his ancestors – the fact that he owned slaves.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
If you're going back past the first comers to America, you're right, the chances of some slaveholding somewhere in your family history is pretty much 100%. The owning of slaves has been prevalent throughout history.
But as I've stated to others here, you don't even have to go back past America's founding. Most everyone, white or black, has some connection to slaveholders right here in America.
In my family, for example, I have records of my forebear Joel Estes, the discoverer and first settler of Estes Park, Colorado, selling his last slaves off in Missouri in 1863. And the family lines going back through Virginia which are full of slaveholders are many.
They’ve all intermarried for generations. Which means that the Ellis Island arrivals and the Tidewater Virginia lines are all mixed up together.
I’d be shocked if there is anyone on this thread who doesn’t have some slaveholding lines somewhere in their family tree. The odds are very small.
For many generations, ethnics from Hungary, Austria, Poland, Italy, etc. weren't intermarrying with people whose ancestors were here earlier than they were!
I can go through every single person, on my maternal line, from the time the first Hungarian members arrived in this nation and not a one of them has EVER married someone whose ancestor was a slave owner. I have one second cousin who could belong to the DAR...except for the fact that her late husband's Irish ancestor was an Irish man in the Brit Army, during the Revolutionary War and he went home, and his family stayed there, until the 20th century ! And that's just my maternal line; I can do the same for my paternal line! Ditto the ancestors of my spouse!
I also can do the same thing for many of my friends, because we like to talk about family history.
You're dead wrong and the more you post, the sillier you look !
While that's true, more importantly, a very large proportion of blacks in this country, at some point in their family tree, are descended from the white slaveholders themselves.
Yes, the slaveholders commonly enslaved their own offspring.
You make a good point. Most of our ancestors came here after slavery was abolished.
The blacks have ancestors who were here before slavery was abolished and many of them - including thousands of blacks - were slave owners.
It was probably PBS that did this with Derek Jeter. They figured out that one of his ancestors was a black slave that had been given a plot of land on the plantation and quite a bit of money upon being freed. That was unusual.
They surmised that the landowner had a boy with a slave woman and had provided for the child. Many times it was rape, but other times there was actual love. Jeter figured (hoped?) it was the later, seeing how the landowner provided so well for the young man.
Blood tests confirmed the speculation.
Are you claiming that Hasidic Jews ( most of whom came here from Russia and Poland) have married someone who has a Tidewater Virginia ancestor?
How about those whose ancestors came from Japan or China ?
I've already told you that absolutely NOBODY in my extended family has married anyone with any connection with someone who can trace their lineage to someone who owned a slave, let alone to someone with any connection to an early settler in Virginia and the same id true of most of my friends, past or present!
Gangsters in the 30’s?
Were they run runners?
Also, many Catholics and Jews didn't marry Protestants, so there's that too.
Indians owned slaves, even before the Europeans got here, so some people with an Indian ancestor, somewhere in their family tree, are connected someway, to a slave owner.
As for slaves, I think Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" did a Bicentennial era thread on a Massachusettsan neglecting to tell his slave that slavery was abolished.
Must have come across some anti Harvard/Cambridge stuff that included Affleck's ancestors while at studying at Yale.
Not only did the slave owners enslave their own offspring, there were slave breeders who enslaved scores of their own offspring. They were black. The whites wouldn’t do slave breeding.
“Slave-Owning Grandfather”?
Imprecise.
His paternal grandfather, Myron Affleck, was born in 1918 and his maternal grandfather, William O’Brien Boldt, was born in 1917. You still have to go back two more generations to get to the right time frame.
(source is Ancestry.com)
I’ve watched this show a few times and it’s the same format everytime. Prof Beer Summit Gates traces some white persons ancestry and it always leads to their aancestor was a slave owner, then overwhelms that person into white guilt.
Quite a few American families, like mine, have lines that have been here for fourteen generations. Most living Americans will find some lines that go back at least ten or twelve generations.
For fourteen generations, that is more than 16,000 different family lines.
For twelve generations, that is more than 4000 family lines.
For ten generations, that is more than 1000 family lines.
Rare is the American family tree that doesn’t have at least some connection to Virginia, which for generations was by far the most populous North American English colony. And virtually all Virginia families had at least some connection to slaveholding.
And while it is often forgotten today, slavery was practiced in the North for hundreds of years as well. It wasn’t as common, but it was there.
Thinking as you do, I seriously doubt you’ve pored over wills and such for more than a thousand family lines.
How Many Ancestors Do You Have?
http://familyforest.com/resources/51/ancestors-at-a-glance
I guess some people aren’t proud of slave ownership. Go figure.
Absolutely.
Affleck - what a joke!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.