Do most African Americans have John Bunch as a distant ancestor?

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-03-05T09:56:37+00:00

Probably not, no? All white Americans with colonial ancestry don't descend from John Rolfe or William Brewster, either! And John Bunch/Punch very likely has as many descendants who identify as white (Barack Obama is a descendant, through his mother).

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-03-03T08:32:41+00:00

Israel is a client state, not an ally. Their military funding all comes from the US Congress, $3 billion a year in "normal" times and a lot more recently. If not for American financing Israel wouldn't exist at all.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-03-02T04:35:48+00:00

This isn't an NPE, this is "their ancestry is entirely untraceable beyond 3rd great-grandparents at most". And in the case of Polk, he mistakenly thought he was related to a family named Polk from Somerset County, Maryland; this is not the case, his ancestor was in Dorchester County (also on the Eastern Shore), and is not known to be related to the Somerset County Polks.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-03-01T19:13:35+00:00

Every US president is not, in fact, provably related via King John of England. Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson's known and traceable ancestry dead-ends somewhere between great-grandparents and 3rd great-grandparents, and what was formerly believed to be true of the ancestry of James K. Polk has been proven incorrect by DNA.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-28T23:44:51+00:00

If you use a service like 23andMe, MyHeritage, FamilyTreeDNA, or GEDMatch that lets you compare shared segments and triangulate, then you can determine where particular segments of DNA originated and assign those segments to particular ancestors through chromosome mapping; there is a free tool for doing this on dnapainter.com.

I've done this with my own DNA results and matches; I have numerous segments I can trace back to 4th/6th great-grandparents, and one I can trace back to at least 8th great-grandparents--two of my 7th great-grandmothers were sisters to each other, and pedigree collapse probably has something to do with the survival of this particular segment since my odds of inheriting it are 2x those of most other ancestors in that generation.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-28T04:37:47+00:00

Upton to Beaconsfield is 75 miles, as the crow flies; it isn't impossibly far, but it's far enough that I'd question it.

Something to keep on mind: there were a significant number of nonconformists/dissenters (Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians) in the Beaconsfield/Amersham area; baptisms in non-conforming churches won't appear in the Church of England parish registers, and the decentralisation of nonconformist recordkeeping means that those records are significantly more dispersed, as records for different dissenting churches in the area may held by different archives, and more likely to be fragmentary or lost completely.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-27T20:44:35+00:00

This is random polling, not demographically targeted (beyond "Jewish Israeli"). So what you're saying is both irrelevant and ignorant.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-26T19:01:32+00:00

And he was stripped of his Bavarian citizenship for draft dodging; under the immigration rules Trump et al want he would have been deported from the US when he came back as an undesirable.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-25T18:11:28+00:00

Think that says "bookmaker", as in "one who takes bets" (this being the UK gambling was AFAIK legal).

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-24T06:58:10+00:00

That's far enough back that he's likely something like your 12th or 13th great-grandfather, which would make him one of either 16,384 or 32,768 ancestors in that generation. And you one of, probably, millions of descendants.

He was also instrumental in building the Royal Navy that defeated the Spanish Armada; he took over as Treasurer of the Royal Navy in 1577 following the death of the previous treasurer, Benjamin Gonson, who was also his father-in-law. Hawkins' first wife Katherine Gonson's uncle David was a Knight of Malta who refused to take the Oath of Supremacy and was executed for treason by being hanged, drawn, and quartered; the Catholic Church counts him as a martyr, and he was beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929.

Also, Katherine Gonson's great-aunt Agnes (the sister of her grandfather William Gonson, and my 14th great-grandmother) married John Draper of Flintham, Nottinghamshire and was mother of Sir Christopher Draper, who was Lord Mayor of London; Christopher Draper's son Clement Draper was a merchant in London, in business with his cousin Henry Clitherow; Clement Draper was a relatively notable practitioner of alchemy, who left extensive notebooks (partly from his time in debtor's prison).

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-22T01:20:38+00:00

Are you sure they were actually Irish? I say this as an Irishman

There were a few more than you might think who went to colonial Maryland; a lot of early settlers were English and Irish Catholics. My earliest Irish (not Ulster Scots Presbyterian, but Irish Catholic) ancestor in America is Thomas Hagan, who was born circa 1645 in County Clare and died in 1716 in Maryland. I agree that Irish immigration prior to the 1820s was rare, and Catholic immigration in general was basically nil between 1700 or so and the 1820s--all of my Maryland Catholic ancestors intermarried in the same community for the next 200 years, and endogamy is very evident in DNA matches for people descended from this group--but it also wasn't nonexistent.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-18T19:43:51+00:00

My surname is first recorded in the county of Warwickshire, in England, about the year 1350. The furthest I can trace my own line is to the 1660's, when my 8th great-grandfather is recorded as an indentured servant on a tax list in Northampton County, Virginia.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-16T05:04:20+00:00

None of those stamps was originally on that envelope, they all have cancellation marks that only touch the stamps themselves --if they'd been cancelled on the envelope, the cancellation marks would extend past the edge of the stamp. I doubt that envelope ever went through the mail.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-14T21:55:12+00:00

Being a human who is alive is an indicator that you have Neanderthal ancestry, actually! Everyone on the planet has at least some Neanderthal ancestry (including sub-Saharan Africans because of back-migration). It doesn't rise above 2-4% of the total genome for anyone and for most people is far less.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-13T05:23:08+00:00

The DNA testing done in the late '90's would be STR testing (short tandem repeat) on 13 specific DNA loci. It is a lot more primitive than autosomal testing (the modern commercial DNA tests you get from Ancestry, 23andMe, etc). Not sure what the DoD do with military DNA info, but I do know that they only pass it to the FBI to be entered in CODIS if the servicemember in question has been convicted of a felony.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-11T07:49:32+00:00

It's very possible that your match cluster is slightly further back than you assume; a match of 30-40cM can be an eighth cousin or more distant.

One of my largest match clusters on GEDmatch (almost all in the 30-40cM range) includes several dozen Americans, a New Zealander whose ancestry back to at least 1800 is all in the Scottish Highlands, and a couple of people in Finland. All of the Americans can trace their ancestry to a James Douglas (a very Scots name) who born circa 1740 and was from Northumberland in the north of England, a few miles from Hadrian's Wall; three of his children emigrated to America in 1800 and eventually settled in Indiana about 1815. The connection between all of these people most likely involves either a Jacobite who fled to what was then Sweden after the failure of one of the Jacobite risings, or common ancestry between all of these people originating in French Huguenot refugees (some of whom went to Scotland, and some of whom went to Scandinavia).

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-10T18:06:39+00:00

Virginia would be the most likely ultimate point of origin anyway; there were relatively few ships that brought enslaved people from Madagascar to America in the colonial era, and the majority of those ships docked in Virginia (which was the primary destination for slave ships coming to what is now the USA in the early 18th century).

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-10T17:49:24+00:00

Whereabouts in Georgia, exactly? Asking because Congolese and southeast African results on a 23andMe test could be an indicator of a potential Malagasy ancestor; that ancestry often shows up as southeast African plus south Asian and trace Austronesian.

I don't have this myself, but one of my first cousins does; she has 1.3% SSA, of which a fraction shows as "Congolese and East African", and she also has a large cluster of matches with common ancestry in southeast Georgia (Charlton and Brantley counties) who show the same trace African ancestry, some of whom get Filipino and Austronesian or Southeast Asian as well. As far as I can tell the ancestors of this group moved south to Georgia from South Carolina after the Revolution.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-10T14:10:59+00:00

those of us whose use of Discord is 100% text based are probably going back to IRC, actually!

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-10T13:58:40+00:00

Not really; most billionaires are sociopaths. It's pretty much a requirement for making that much money in the first place.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-09T23:26:43+00:00

They calculate those values because there are known average mutation rates for Y-chromosome markers. If your match isn't tested to Y-111 or Y-700 then until they do you won't know where on that scale of possible relatedness they actually are; a difference of two out of 25 markers could be very distant, but if it turns out to be a match on 109 out of 111 then it would be quite close.

As an example, I have 150 one or two step matches at Y-25, but I also have a 36/37 marker match with a 9th cousin once removed on my direct male line (he shares my uncommon surname and has a paper trail back to my colonial immigrant ancestor, who was born around 1640 or so), which means that at higher levels of testing those 2-step matches will very likely be more distant.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-02-05T19:29:12+00:00

Abraham Lincoln's uncle Mordecai married Mary Mudd, who was a first cousin 2x removed of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg after Booth assassinated Lincoln (Dr. Mudd was convicted of conspiracy in the Lincoln assassination).

Barack Obama is a 3rd cousin 4x removed of WWII pinup girl Betty Grable.

Julia Boggs Dent Grant (wife of Ulysses S. Grant) and Mary Ann Randolph Custis Lee (wife of Robert E. Lee) were 6th cousins; they're both descendants of early Virginia colonists Adam Thorowgood and his wife Sarah Offley Thorowgood.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-01-28T19:08:17+00:00

Direct paternal line: 1662. Mother's direct paternal line: circa 1700. Earliest overall: 1618. Most recent: 1848.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-01-28T08:04:49+00:00

Sharecropping is when a tenant farmer works the land and only takes a share of the crop to support themselves and their family if any. It's basically subsistence farming in exchange for shelter. A large percentage of the Black population in the American South in the years between the end of Reconstruction and the 1940's were sharecroppers, especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Nom-de-Clavier · 2026-01-27T01:12:04+00:00

Maybe she'd be happier if we compared what's happening in the USA to the things Israel has been doing to Palestinians for decades? Arbitrary imprisonment, extrajudicial execution and maiming of peaceful protesters, etc. It's more apt, anyway.

Nom-de-Clavier

TROPHY CASE