| From: Snowshoe | 8/2/2024 2:33:21 AM | | | | | | 4 Ex-Presidents Who Ran Again — And What They Mean for Trump
politico.com
By Joshua Zeitz
11/15/2022 04:30 AM EST
Only a handful of presidents have run for a non-consecutive term, and only one* has won. Could Donald Trump become the second?
The 4 were: Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland*, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover |
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| From: Brumar89 | 10/1/2024 4:49:02 PM | | | | | |
Latinos are questioning family racial narratives as they uncover their ancestry (nbcnews.com)
They're uncovering their ancestry — and questioning their families' racial narratives
Digitized archives and DNA testing prove what these Latinos suspected: Family histories that focused on white, Spanish ancestry include African roots and the legacy of slavery.
Family ties to both enslaved and colonial ancestors — including slave owners — can now be uncovered, and many are rethinking their identities and filling the gaps in incomplete family histories.Justine Goode / NBC News; Getty Images
Sept. 29, 2024, 4:00 AM CDT
By Edward Rueda
Comedian Gadiel del Orbe always heard his brown-skinned Dominican father say their family came from Spain or the Canary Islands, but their more obvious African roots never came up.
When del Orbe got his DNA test results four years ago, he learned his direct maternal line was related to the Tikar people of Cameroon. He didn’t expect to get emotional, but he started crying once he heard the Tikar are renowned dancers.
“I love dancing. I do comedy, but dancing is my life — bachata, merengue, salsa,” del Orbe said. “To know that the Tikar people are known for dancing just answered questions about me. Things about me align with my ancestors.”
For del Orbe and other Latinos, technological advances and greater access to DNA testing are proving what they long suspected: Their family histories, which were long focused on their white, Spanish ancestry, include African roots and the legacy of slavery.
 For Gadiel del Orbe, "things about me align with my ancestors." Courtesy Gadiel del OrbeFamily ties to both enslaved and colonial ancestors — including slave owners — can now be uncovered in free online databases, digitized archives and AI-powered indexing, which provide unprecedented access to documents from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Discovering these personal ties is often an emotional process, and many Latinos are using that knowledge to rethink their own identities and their past. They’re also filling the gaps of incomplete family histories that have been passed on for generations.
‘What were they hiding?’
Growing up in the Bronx, genealogist Ellen Fernandez-Sacco was raised by “flat-out racist” Puerto Rican parents who said they were white, though she suspected otherwise.
“I couldn’t bring Black friends home. I couldn’t have a Black boyfriend,” Fernandez-Sacco said. “But my dad used to sleep with pomade and the end of a nylon stocking on his hair. What were they hiding?”
Over a half-century later, Puerto Rican church records helped Fernandez-Sacco build a rare paper trail back to Africa. The 1810 burial record of her sixth-great-grandfather, Juan José Carrillo, described him as “free Black” and a “native of Guinea.”
 Ellen Fernandez-Sacco’s family photo from the Bronx, N.Y., circa 1963. Ellen is the little girl.Courtesy Ellen Fernandez-Sacco“I was floored. I was so elated,” Fernandez-Sacco said.
Of the estimated 10.5 million enslaved Africans who landed in the Americas between 1501 and 1866, about 96% came to Latin America and the Caribbean. And while nearly half went to Brazil, Spanish Latin America received more than triple the number of enslaved Africans than what the mainland United States did.
And this history is reflected in the genes. A recent genetic study of over 6,000 Mexicans shows a near ubiquity of descent from enslaved people as well as slaveholders, with ancestries from West Africa observed in every Mexican state, “in agreement with historical records of shipping voyages from the transatlantic slave trade.”
 In Cuba, a cabinet holds Catholic parish records, including those from Baracoa, the country's oldest Spanish settlement. Courtesy Slave Societies Digital Archive
Yet the notion that Latino and Black identities are separate or incompatible — and the reality of anti-Black racism — have deep historical roots. While African influence can be found in Latin American food, music and culture, the colonial caste system denigrated African heritage and favored light skin, making the term mejorando la raza (improving the race) a household phrase: It refers to a Latino whose partner or children are whiter than they are — in what’s considered a step up.
And in the U.S. and Latin America, the realities of racism pressured many families to identify as white despite Indigenous and Black roots. In the 2010 census, over half (53%) of Latinos identified as white only. In a Pew Research survey conducted in 2019 and 2020, roughly 12% of U.S. Latinos identified as Afro Latino.
A race to preserve history Catholic Church records are among the few documents that recorded enslaved people’s names and families.
To help preserve these histories, Jane Landers, a historian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, co-founded the Slave Societies Digital Archive in 2003. Today, SlaveSocieties.org offers free access to more than 3,900 digitized volumes of church and business records, totaling more than 750,000 images.
 Researchers look through old documents in Brazil. Courtesy Slave Societies Digital ArchiveLanders calls her small-scale, fast-acting efforts “guerrilla preservation.” Local students and archivists in places like Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and St. Augustine, Florida, receive donated digital cameras and learn to organize, preserve and digitize their own collections.
But what documents have survived are almost always faded, crumbling, torn, eaten by pests or otherwise damaged. Climate change, political instability, neglect and indifference also endanger archives.
Landers received a photo showing people in southern Cuba shoveling bundles of old records into a furnace, not caring for the history being lost.
“I just helped someone in Brazil get a grant for saving legal records in a little archive that wasn’t going to hold them any longer,” Landers said. “That happens a lot.”
 A volume of notarized business records (protocolos) from 1825 in Cartagena, Colombia. Courtesy Slave Societies Digital ArchiveAs Landers’ team races against time to digitize, Vanderbilt professors are training AI to read and transcribe the entire Slave Societies collection. FamilySearch, another free online archive operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, increasingly uses computer indexing and full-text search on its more than 5 billion digitized images, including documents from every Spanish-speaking Latin American country and Brazil.
“You can find your families. They weren’t just property,” Landers said. “They were everything from soldiers to seamstresses to private business owners to slave traders, even.”
‘Follow these DNA trails’ Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of the Emmy-nominated PBS series “ Finding Your Roots,” says it’s common for family lore to erase Black heritage. Singer-songwriter Carly Simon came on the show wanting to know more about her grandmother who claimed to be the king of Spain’s love child. Church records revealed that Simon’s grandmother was born in Cuba and descended from slaves, and DNA analysis showed that 10% of Simon’s ancestry was sub-Saharan African.
Simon’s grandmother “made up all these stories to hide her African roots,” Gates said. “It’s much easier to embrace fantasy than it is to think about rape, or cajoled sexuality at best.”
Gates says it’s also common for Latinos to have slaveholders in their family tree. Eight Latino guests on “Finding Your Roots” learned of slave-owning ancestors, including former NBA All-Star player Carmelo Anthony, TV host and lawyer Sunny Hostin and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio. Looking at the baptismal record of his ancestor’s slave, Rubio commented to Gates, “If you baptize them, it’s because you believe they had a soul. … How then could you own them?”
 Sunny Hostin and Henry Louis Gates on “Finding Your Roots.”Courtesy McGee Media
Through SlaveSocieties.org, this reporter confronted his own family’s slave-owning past: Notary records from Cartagena, Colombia — once the largest slave port in South America — revealed an 1831 will of a previously unknown fourth-great-grandmother who left her daughter three enslaved youths as well as 100 pesos to purchase yet another slave. This reporter never thought that their humble Colombian immigrant grandmother, who sewed garments in New York sweatshops, could have been three and four generations removed from slave owners.
Exploring his own family tree, Texas-based genealogist Moises Garza uncovered both Afro Mexican ancestors and slave-owning forebears, reflecting the estimated 200,000 enslaved Africans brought to colonial Mexico. Garza first became interested in genealogy when he and his father were migrant workers in Texas, listening to his father’s family stories during long hours picking carrots. Over a quarter century later, Garza has compiled an online database with 1.1 million names from northeastern Mexico and Texas, and feels no need to distance himself from forebears who were conquistadors or slavers.
“I’m not going to say I’m embarrassed or going to apologize for what they did, because I have ancestors on both sides,” Garza said. “Some were the conqueror, some were the conquered. History is history and we learn from it. Or we get mad about it, but what’s the use of that?”
Gates said one is not restricted “to the good or bad things that your ancestors did — you want to go back to the original sin, look at the complicity between African merchants and elites and European merchants and elites over the course of the slave trade.”
“It’s a nasty and dishonest business to attempt to hold a person responsible for the stuff their ancestors did,” Gates said.
And yet uncovering the history of slavery is important, especially when so many Latin American families hid or intentionally forgot their African and Indigenous roots.
 Teresa Vega, center, found her genetic cousin from Ghana, George Graves-Sampson, second from left, and met him and his family for the first time in New York in 2019.Courtesy Teresa Vega“
Enslavement [and] genocide were designed to cut the ties that bind,” said Teresa Vega, an African American and Puerto Rican genealogist and public educator based in New York. “So you have to follow these DNA trails, figure out and flesh out your [family] trees and look for all possibilities.”
Vega’s parents separated when she was little, and it took a DNA test for Vega to connect with her paternal Puerto Rican family.
“I had been to Puerto Rico before, but I reconnected with my Taíno and Afro Indigenous side,” Vega said. “I feel like I’m 100% who I am.”
 Giselle Rivera-Flores said her DNA findings gave her a “sense of identity no one can take away.”Courtesy Giselle Rivera Flores
Giselle Rivera-Flores, a communications director in Worcester, Massachusetts, didn’t need a DNA test to know she was Afro Latina — her Puerto Rican family’s “Black skin and coarse hair” made that obvious. But finding out that 40% of her DNA matches Africans in countries like Cameroon, Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, Mali and Benin gave her “a sense of identity — one that no one can take away from me or debate about.”
While Rivera-Flores still has trouble convincing her mother and older relatives to embrace their Afro Latino heritage, she wants her three young children to know the insights she’s gained by knowing where she comes from.
“Staying true to who you are opens up a new perspective on how you view the world,” Rivera-Flores said. “It connects you with a lot of empathy for people.”
‘Here they are’ Following the loss of her Puerto Rican grandfather, filmmaker Alexis Garcia made her 2022 short film “ Daughter of the Sea.” The film, which stars rapper Princess Nokia, draws inspiration from the Yoruba faith, an African religion practiced in Latin America.
Garcia first learned about the Yoruba faith at her grandmother’s botánica (religious goods store) in the Bronx, where her devout Catholic grandmother, Jerusalén Morales, called on Yoruba orishas (spirits) during spiritual readings and kept statues of orishas alongside Catholic saints. But it took years for Garcia to appreciate how the orishas directly connect her with her African roots.
“This is part of our inheritance. We didn’t have a material inheritance, but we have this spiritual inheritance,” Garcia said.
 Jerusalén Morales and her granddaughter Alexis Garcia.Courtesy Alexis Garcia
When Garcia tested her DNA, she found it “thrilling and emotional” to learn her direct maternal DNA — inherited from the grandmother who ran the botánica — comes from the Igbo people of Nigeria.
“To tell my mother and my grandmother the proof of who we are and where we came from … I feel like there was a spark from me to seven generations in the past,” Garcia said.
Garcia and her cousin Selina Morales have started a film production company, and they’re working on a feature film and a documentary on traditional healers in Puerto Rico. When they named the company, their grandmother once again provided inspiration: Botánica Pictures.
“Selina was told by our grandma that she was going to own a botánica. At that time she was like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to own a store selling candles,’” Garcia said. “When we landed on the name, we understood the prophecy from our grandmother.”
 Filmmaker Alexis Garcia made the 2022 short film “Daughter of the Sea.”Cesar Berrios / Courtesy Alexis Garcia
Garcia hopes to learn more about her family history. She has a photo of her great-great-grandmother, who was born enslaved in Puerto Rico around 1845, and she wants her work to motivate other Afro Latinos to connect with their Black identity and their past.
“The Black grandmother was always in the kitchen or at the back of the house, hidden away from the public. My aspiration is the liberation of ourselves and the liberation of our grandmothers,” Garcia said. “To no longer be like, ‘Where are they?’ Here I am. Here they are.” |
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| From: Brumar89 | 10/12/2024 10:32:53 AM | | | | | | ‘Who Blackened Thy Bloodline’: Thomas Jefferson’s Black Descentdant Sparks Controversy with Bold Recreation of His Ancestor’s Photo
Posted byBy Nicole Duncan-Smith | Published on: October 11, 2024 CommentsComments (0)
Four years after Smithsonian Magazine published photos of Shannon LaNier, a Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson, dressed like his ancestor, many have mixed feelings about him embracing his heritage.
Critics focused on how Jefferson wrote the words “all men are created equal” but never freed his own slaves and started a relationship with LaNier’s direct matrilineal ancestor Sally Hemings, when she was just 14 and he was 44.
The image resurfaced on the X platform with one person simply sharing LaNier and Jefferson’s portraits side by side. But immediately, the trolls began to chime in.
“Thomas Jefferson rollin in his grave rn,” one person suggested,
A few people said that they saw a familiar likeness despite the difference in race, tweeting, “They look the same!” and “I see the resemblance.”
“He look pissed like ‘who blackend thy bloodline’ heada—,” one person joked.
One comment read, “Why are we glorifying someone who had such a complex and controversial legacy? Just because he’s a descendant doesn’t mean we should romanticize the past without acknowledging its flaws”
“Thomas Jefferson would not have claimed him if he was alive today,” someone else tweeted.
Some brought up the controversy about whether or not the Hemings children are actually descended from the third president or someone else.
 Shannon LaNier poses in the same style as his 6x grandfather, 3rd president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. (Photo: YouTube from Drew Gardner’s page)
Another wrote, “He ain’t had a single mulato child. This is fake history.”
This is historically, untrue. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the official estate of the former president, released the statement saying, “A considerable body of evidence stretching from 1802 to 1873 (and beyond) describes Thomas Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings’s children. It was corroborated by the findings of the Y-chromosome haplotype DNA study conducted by Dr. Eugene Foster and published in the scientific journal Nature in November 1998.”
According to their scientific study, DNA study did prove the paternity of a Jefferson family member and corroborated the ample documentary and oral history evidence.
“Other evidence supports Thomas Jefferson’s paternity as well, including his presence at Monticello during Sally Hemings’s likely windows of conception, the names of Hemings’s surviving children, and the fact that all of her children were granted freedom – they were either allowed to leave the plantation, or legally emancipated in Jefferson’s will, a unique occurrence among Monticello’s enslaved families,” the foundation continued.
LaNier, himself, spoke out about being a descendant of Jefferson, posting an AI version of the portraits where his face and his presidential ancestor’s faces softly morphing into each other’s.
“YES #President #ThomasJefferson had #Black #kids? This is not a flex, just facts! Love it or hate it, I’m here b/c of it. You can’t pick your #family but we can expose their historical injustices! #Jefferson owned over 600 enslaved people and had children with at least 1 of them, #SallyHemings,” he wrote in a caption posted on July 4.
“It wasn’t consensual love b/c she was his property,” he continued, noting the complicated nature of his ancestors’ relationship.
“No need to fight on this page about it! It’s just the complicated truth of American History. I’m the 6th great grandson of Jefferson & Hemings and there are a lot of us! This is why I tour the country speaking about my family, your family, DNA, historical healing and reconciliation. Some don’t want us to know our history, but truth is power! We must preserve the truth… the good, bad & ugly!”
This is not the first time that LaNier has spoken out about is his views on Jefferson, sharing the pride he has to be a descendant but acknowledging the hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence co-author.
While promoting his book, “Jefferson’s Children: The Story Of One American Family,” in 2020, he called his grandfather “a complex man.”
“I just am conflicted because I wish he would have done more for my family. I wish he would have done more to free this world of slavery,” he said in an interview with NPR. “I mean, he was the most powerful man in the country. He could have done more. And one abolitionist once wrote that never before has a man received such fame for what he did not do – because he wrote those words, all men are created equal. But yet he didn’t practice them.”
LaNier participated in the project with The Smithsonian as a part of a larger collection of history. Originally, when he was asked to participate, they asked him to wear the powdered wig. He declined, stating he did not want to appear white, saying he didn’t want to “become Jefferson,” in an interview about the project with Artnet.com.
During the 2020 project, British photographer Drew Gardner identified several blood relatives of famous historical figures and asked them to pose in their relatives’ likenesses.
While the images are powerful, the stark contrast of LaNier and the white Jefferson will continue to spark controversy, as it is a living witness of the complicated nature of American enslavement of yesteryear and its continued reach into today’s present. |
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| From: Brumar89 | 10/13/2024 2:35:46 PM | | | | | | Christopher Columbus was secretly Jewish (msn.com)
The DNA findings challenge the theory that Columbus was an Italian sailor from Genoa - © Bettmann/CORBIS
Christopher Columbus was Jewish, DNA experts concluded in a long-awaited investigation into the true origins of one of history’s most famous explorers.
Researcher conducted over 22 years suggests that Columbus was not a sailor from Genoa, as previously believed, but in fact from a family of Jewish silk spinners from Valencia.
Examinations of the bones of Columbus and of his son, Hernando, showed a Jewish origin, something the explorer concealed during a time in which Jews were being persecuted in Spain and other parts of Europe.
The discovery was the culmination of two decades of investigation led by Antonio Lorente, professor of legal and forensic medicine at the University of Granada.
It was presented in a prime-time Spanish television documentary on Saturday night to coincide with Spain’s national day.
José Antonio Lorente collecting what is believed to be Christopher Columbus’s bones
DNA tests indicated that the famous explorer was of Sephardic Jewish origin
“Both in the ‘Y’ chromosome and in the mitochondrial chromosome of Hernando, there are traits compatible with Jewish origins,” Prof Lorente declared.
He said the DNA showed a “western Mediterranean” origin, but he could not state categorically which country or region.
Francesc Albardaner, a historian who has written extensively about Columbus having origins in Catalan-speaking eastern Spain, explained that being Jewish and from Genoa was effectively impossible in the 15th century.
“Jews could only spend three days at a time in Genoa by law at that time,” said Mr Albardaner.
Mr Albardaner said his research has shown that Columbus was from a family of Jewish silk spinners from the Valencia region.
Portrait of Christopher Columbus by Sebastiano del Piombo - Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
In the same year of 1492 that Columbus landed on Guanahani in the Bahamas, Spain’s Catholic monarchs Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon ordered the expulsion of all Jews who did not agree to convert to Christianity.
“Christopher Columbus had to pretend all his life that he was a Roman Catholic Christian. If he had made one mistake, this man would have ended up on the pyre,” said Mr Albardaner.
The DNA research shows that Columbus lied about his family; Diego Columbus was the explorer’s second cousin and not his brother, as he told the Spanish court.
A key part of the puzzle was to establish that the remains said to be those of Columbus kept in a tomb in Seville cathedral were really those of the explorer, in the face of a longstanding claim by the Dominican Republic to be the resting place of Columbus.
The Tomb of Columbus inside of Seville Cathedral, Seville, Spain - Edwin Remsberg/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Prof Lorente’s team established without doubt that the Seville bones were those of Columbus thanks to a close match with the DNA found in the remains of his son, Hernando, kept in the same cathedral.
Speaking on the documentary ‘DNA Columbus – his true origin’, Prof Lorente agreed that Columbus was almost certainly not from mainland Italy and said that there was no solid evidence that he had come from France.
“What do we have left? The Spanish Mediterranean arc, the Balearic Islands and Sicily. But Sicily would also be strange, because if so, Christopher Columbus would have written with some Italian or Sicilian features. So it is most likely that his origin is in the Spanish Mediterranean arc or in the Balearic Islands”, the scientist said.
Researchers claim there is no trace of Italian influence in the writing
Analysis of the around 40 letters signed by Columbus that have been preserved show that his writing in Castilian Spanish was free of any Italian influences, with researchers pointing out that he even wrote letters to a bank in Genoa in Spanish.
Mr Albardaner said: “There were around 200,000 Jews living in Spain in Columbus’ time. In the Italian peninsula, it is estimated that there were only between 10,000 and 15,000. There was a much larger Jewish population in Sicily of around 40,000, but we should remember that Sicily, in Columbus’ time, belonged to the Crown of Aragon.” |
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