Psst!
Without modern genetics, the only reliable way to trace inheritance is through the mother only.
Paternal counts for nothing, unless you've got a lab far beyond the ken of the 18th century!
Founding fathers and people of that time period were patriarchal. Precedence was to the man. Women didn't even have right to vote. The founders were smart. Things went downhill after women's suffrage.
“Paternal counts for nothing, unless you’ve got a lab far beyond the ken of the 18th century!”
Natural born citizenship in Western cultures have always required a citizen father within the jurisdiction of the sovereign for status as a natural born citizen since the days of the Roman Republic and the Greek city states. Descent of citizenship was rare, but it did exist for subjects of the Roman sovereignty. Acquisition of citizenship by descent from a citizen mother has never existed in English, British, or U.S. jurisdictions except by naturalization, and in the United States this naturalization has only been available since the 1934 change in the naturalization law.
The rule of English law was that all children of a marriage were legally considered to be the children of the Husband, regardless of who was the actual father.
There are bits and pieces of that legal doctrine still embedded in US law.