Was Leonardo the Son of a Slave?

Leonardo da Vinci is known to have been the illegitimate son of Piero da Vinci and a woman named Caterina. Evidence has emerged that Caterina was not a run-of-the-mill peasant girl, as was previously thought.

Now, 30-year-old research conducted by the late director of the Leonardo Library, published by his son Francesco, suggests a completely different scenario.

"Archival research has shown that there isn't any Caterina in Vinci or nearby villages that can be linked to Ser Piero. The only Caterina in Piero's life seems to be a slave girl who lived in the house of his wealthy friend Vanni di Niccolo di Ser Vanni," Cianchi wrote.

The claim is supported by recent research suggesting the Italian genius was of Arabic descent, following analysis of his fingerprint.

"It was common in Renaissance Florence to own slaves from the Middle East and the Balkans. At the time of Leonardo's birth there were more than 550 slaves in Florence, meaning that all the wealthy families had slaves in their houses. The girls were baptized and renamed. The most popular names were Maria, Marta and Caterina," Agnese Sabato said. [Link]

David Wilson? Meet David Wilson

Meeting David Wilson premieres April 11 on MSNBC.

David Wilson, a 28-year-old African-American journalist, journeys into his family’s past to find answers to America’s racial divide. Along the way he meets another David Wilson, the descendant of his family’s slave master. This discovery leads to a momentous encounter between these two men of the same name but whose ancestors were on the opposite sides of freedom. Through DNA testing, David determines his African roots and returns to his native land. [Link]

Marriage Can Be Liberating

No proof has been found, but Conservative MP Boris Johnson insists that his ancestor bought himself a wife.

Mr Johnson says his great-great-grandmother, a Circassian slave from a region in southern Russia, was sold to his great-great-grandfather after she fled from war to Turkey in around 1862.

She was set free only when the couple later married.

Yesterday, Mr Johnson insisted he was the "proud offspring of Turkish immigrants", saying: "This is not in any way casting aspersions on my great-great-grandfather.

"He wasn't a slave owner, he was a slave marrier." [Link]

News of Emancipation Came Late

Cain Wall's family in Mississippi was allegedly held in slavery until 1961. It wasn't until 2001 that his daughter discovered that their bondage was illegal.

The Wall family had no idea that they were free even though Black families in nearby Liberty, Miss., owned businesses and attended school.

Cain Wall Sr. was born in 1902 into peonage in St. Helena Parish, La. He worked the fields and milked cows for white families while believing he had no rights as a man. Peonage is a system where one is bound to service for payment of a debt. It was an illegal system that flourished in the rural South after slavery was abolished. Mr. Cain was born into this system believing that he was bound to these people that held him and his relatives captive. [Link, via kottke.org]

Cain (who was probably about 104 at the time) made an appearance on Nightline last year.

I Think We Can Rule Out Jefferson

Elmer Milton's great-uncle, Pierson Craig, turned 101 on Tuesday.

“He’s the grandson of a slave,” Milton said. “He said his grandmother, which was a slave born in 1847, was my great-great-great grandmother, Amanda Montgomery.”

Amanda would tell Craig that she was the only slave on the Alabama plantation who didn’t have to work outdoors, Milton said. “I believe she was the daughter of a president,” Milton said was his family’s story passed down through generations. “... They never did get to prove it.” [Link]

His Uncle Was Fearless

Supreme Court Justice and civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall's forename has an interesting history.

In honor of his paternal grandfather, Thurgood was given two first names, Thorneygood and Thoroughgood, when he was born. When Thurgood's grandfather, a former slave, had joined the U.S. Army, he hadn't been sure what to call himself. So he signed up under both names and later wound up getting two sets of retirement checks. In time, grandson Marshall would decide he preferred the name Thoroughgood. In the second or third grade, he would shorten it to Thurgood. [Link]

His mother's family had its share of unusual names as well.

His maternal grandfather, Isaiah O. B. (for Olive Branch, he said) Williams, also went to sea, came home with money and a taste for opera and Shakespeare. He opened a grocery on Baltimore's Den-meade Street, and sired six children. The first was Avonia Delicia and the second Avon (both for the bard's river), the third was Denmedia Marketa (for the store), another was Norma Arica (he heard Norma in Arica, a Chilean port) and the remaining two, for reasons lost to history, were Fearless Mentor and Ravine Silestria. [Link]

'Dat turn the world upside down'

Danette Holmes Burnette discovered that her great-great-grandfather, a slave named Cornelius Holmes, was owned by U.S. Congressman Preston Brooks.

The same Preston Brooks who beat a senator unconscious on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1856 after that senator denounced slavery.

The incident sparked a national furor, prompting Brooks' resignation and return to office, shortly before the Civil War.

Burnette even found an interview with Cornelius among the Slave Narratives on the Library of Congress website.

"Dat turn the world upside down," is what Cornelius Holmes told the interviewer of what Preston Brooks did. [Link]

They Didn't Forget to Remember

A saying was passed down in Bettye Kearse's family: "Remember your name is Madison." A reunion of slave descendants this weekend at James Madison's Virginia plantation might bring her a step closer to proving the truth of the saying.

Kearse said her family traces its roots back to a slave named Corean, who was reportedly owned by Madison and gave birth to a son named Jim. When Jim was sold to a plantation owner in Tennessee, she told him not to forget he was a Madison in case they should ever reconnect. Since then, the saying's meaning has evolved.

"Initially it was a tool, then it became valuable after the slaves were free because my family really did well. They owned property, participated in government, learned to read and then they passed this legacy on," Kearse said. [Link]

The Hasbins Have Been Hasbeens

In the course of collecting material for a book on the Dunbar community in Georgetown County, South Carolina, Joyce Cox-Holmes learned from John Hasbin the origin of his unusual surname.

He told Holmes that his family came from a plantation near Greenfield owned by a man named Hazard or Hazzard. The slave people rented from Hazzard. When they were freed, they changed from Hazard to Hasbeen. That’s now become Hasbin. The name developed because these people “has been a slave no longer.” Holmes said, “It’s a change, a make-up name.” [Link]

Did He Join the Wrong Army?

One of the contenders at this weekend's Kentucky Derby is a horse named for Charlie Curlin, a slave who fought with the United States Colored Troops in the Civil War.

But it was after his honorable discharge from the army that Curlin's story took its most intriguing turn. Charlie Curlin, Union Army veteran, came home from war thinking he was a Confederate, on the side of the people he had fought.

"Charlie Curlin was truly confused about who he was fighting for. That's very clear from stories he told when he got back home," said lawyer Shirley Cunningham Jr. of Georgetown, the man who named Curlin, the horse. [Link]

A Veep Dark Secret

It took genealogist Brenda Gene Gordon many years to discover that she is descended from a U.S. Vice President

How on earth could Brenda Gordon not have known that her great-great-great-grandfather was Vice President Richard M. Johnson? Wasn’t this fact passed proudly from generation to generation inside her family?

No, it was not.

Why not? Because the woman who bore Johnson’s two children – a woman named Julia Chinn – was, by law, a Negro. [Link]

Johnson was clearly a man ahead of his time, who made no effort to hide his relationship with the woman he had "inherited" from his father.

For example, nearly twenty years after Johnson's retirement, it was brought up during the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858. Douglas insinuated that Lincoln approved of interracial marriage. Lincoln deflected this charge by saying that the only distinguished person he knew of who felt that way was "Judge Douglas's old friend Col. Richard M. Johnson." [Link]

Still Trafficking in Human Misery

One family has found a way to continue benefiting from the slave trade. To mark the 200th anniversary of legislation ending the British Empire's involvement in the practice, unnamed individuals are putting up for auction a slave ship log book once owned by their ancestor, the ship's master. It could bring $6,000 or more.

It is unclear if the logbook owners, who [auction house] Bonhams say they believe are descendants of "master" Lewis, are aware of the criticism surrounding the slave ship log auction.

After the auction, one legal expert says, there theoretically could be legal ramifications for the owners.

"What comes to mind under common law approach is to bring an action that we refer to as unjust enrichment," says Mark Ellis, Executive Director of the International Bar Association. [Link]

I think we've finally found some people who are fully qualified to apologize for slavery.

Candidate Accepts DNA Donations From Slave Owners

The genealogical muckraking continues. The Barack Obama pedigree I mentioned several weeks ago has caught the attention of The Baltimore Sun. They've used it to prove that some of Obama's ancestors owned slaves.

According to the research, one of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 Census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.

"The twist is very interesting," said Ronald Walters, a political scientist who is director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park. "It deepens his connection with the experience of slavery, even if it deepens it on a different side of the equation." [Link]

Overall and Duvall's refusal to come forward and answer these charges only worsens the situation for Obama. If they want their descendant to become president, they need to learn how to handle the press.

She Didn't Stay for Lunch

Chicago Sun-Times business reporter Francine Knowles got some help tracing her roots from Megan—who apparently has given up sleep as a condition of her new position at Ancestry.com. Francine was helped also by the long memory of her father, who remembered the former slave enumerated with his family in 1930.

Mama Creasy was apparently psychic. According to my dad, she lived to be either 115 or 116 years old, and on her last day on this earth, she told everyone earlier in the day she was going to die at noon. My dad recalled, "When daddy came into the house after farming out in the field that morning, she said, 'I told you I was going to die at 12 o'clock.' She said, 'You all have been good to me, and I want to thank you.' She took her last breath as a bell outside tolled noon." [Link]

Genealogy Makes Strange Bedfellows

A couple of notable genealogists have discovered that the family histories of two presidential aspirants—Strom Thurmond and Al Sharpton—intersected in the antebellum South.

According to the Daily News, the genealogists found documents establishing that Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was Strom Thurmond's great-great-grandfather. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.

The newspaper said the lead researcher was Megan Smolenyak, the chief family historian for Ancestry.com and an author of several published books on genealogy. Another researcher on the project was Tony Burroughs, who teaches genealogy at Chicago State University. [Link]

When first told of the connection, a nephew of Senator Thurmond exclaimed, "That's a bunch of baloney," while a niece graciously allowed that "it is wonderful that [Sharpton] was able to become what he is in spite of what his forefather was."

Were he still alive, the Senator would undoubtedly be thrilled, given his close relations with the black community.

A Peculiar Example of a Peculiar Institution

Sherrod Bryant was a typical wealthy slave owner in Tennessee prior to the Civil War, but he differed from his slave-holding neighbors in one respect: he was black.

Today, the notion of a black man owning black slaves seems contradictory — Bryant himself was a free black — and perhaps even hypocritical. According to Bryant's descendants, however, their ancestor, who was never a slave, was simply following the normal pattern of life for a rich landowner in the Upper South.

"I think at some point some of the members (of the family) might not have looked upon it very favorably, but the more we discuss it, the more we suddenly realize that to gain wealth during that time, if you had a lot of property, you had to have slaves to help you cultivate it," said Carl Bryant, a fourth-generation descendant of Sherrod. [Link]

They Weren't All Working on the Railroad

While poking holes in the quilt myth, history professor Martin Hershock notes that this is not the only far-fetched tale of the Underground Railroad.

"Any time you're dealing with the Underground Railroad, the myths are monumental," Hershock told me.

"Virtually any house that dates from the antebellum period is going to have a claim affixed to it that it was part of the Underground Railroad. If every house that had such a claim attached to it were actually a part of the Underground Railroad, there would have been a giant sucking sound as every single slave from Kentucky was instantaneously drawn out of the South." [Link]

Founding Father Found Fathering

James Madison was a protégé of fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, and succeeded him as president. Could the two men have had something else in common?

[Bettye] Kearse, a practicing pediatrician who has a doctorate in biology, has traced her pedigree back to a slave named Mandy who bore a daughter, Coreen, with James Madison Sr. Coreen, also a slave, bore a son, Jim, with her half-brother, James Madison Jr. Since James and Dolley Madison never had children, Kearse could prove that Madison's only descendents are Black.

Kearse, of Dover, Mass., says the foundation of her claim is based on oral history. When Jim was sold, Coreen reportedly told him "always remember you're a Madison." [Link]

A Warm and Fuzzy Myth

The New York Times yesterday covered the debunking of the quilt code myth—the legend that patterns stitched into quilts guided escaping slaves to freedom in the North. The myth stems from a story told by quiltmaker (and able saleswoman) Ozella McDaniel Williams to Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard, who repeated it in a 1999 book.

According to “Hidden in Plain View,” slaves created quilts with codes to advise those fleeing captivity. What looked to the slave master like an abstract panel on a quilt being “aired out” on a porch in fact represented a reminder, say, to be sure to follow a zigzag path to avoid being tracked when escaping. In Ms. Williams’s account, there was a sequence of 10 panels to guide an escaping slave, beginning with a “monkey wrench” pattern meaning to gather up tools and supplies and concluding with a star, a reminder to head north. [Link]

The story is no more substantiated than the lawn jockey legend I wrote about last September. Today at Boston 1775, J. L. Bell provides a plausible explanation of why these myths take hold so quickly and firmly. Here he quotes Roberta Gold:

It seems to me that the spread of the quilt myth is part of a larger popular “domestication” of African American past, in which the complex, bleak and tragic dimensions of black history are softened and smoothed into something that isn’t too disturbing to teach to kindergartners. . . . The injustice is not erased, exactly, but it’s air-brushed with a disproportionate amount of heartwarming, feel-good interpretation. In the case of “code quilts,” it’s literally made into something warm and fuzzy. [Link]

PRSEPCWRA Passes House

The House passed a bill on Monday that would require the National Archives to create an online database of records useful to African-American genealogists. The measure now goes to the Senate.

The Preservation of Records of Servitude, Emancipation and Post-Civil War Reconstruction Act (H.R. 390) requires the National Archives to establish an electronic database for the public to keep records from the Southern Claims Commission, the Freedman’s Bank, slave payrolls and slave manifests. [Link]

Something tells me the President will be signing this into law sometime next month.

The sole dissenting vote was cast by Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), but you really can't blame him: He votes against everything. He's a libertarian, a possible presidential hopeful, and a former OB/GYN who has earned the nickname "Dr. No" for voting against such wasteful measures as awarding Congressional Gold Medals of Honor to Pope John Paul II, Rosa Parks, and Mother Teresa.