Obama's slave roots: it's long been assumed that the nation's first black president didn't have any personal ties to slavery. But new research indicates that Barack Obama's white mother was descended from one of the earliest documented slaves in America.

• Author: Stolberg, Sheryl Gay
• Position: NATIONAL

president Obama's biography--son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas--has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.

Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking. They say that Obama's mother had at least one African forebear in addition to her white European ancestors, and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.

The findings come from Ancestry.com, the Utah-based genealogy company. While lacking definitive proof, its researchers say they have evidence that "strongly suggests" President Obama's family tree--on his mother's side--stretches back nearly four centuries to John Punch, a slave in colonial Virginia.

In 1640, Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment--servitude for life--was harsher than what the white servants received. This has led some historians to regard Punch as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, long before Virginia adopted laws on slavery in the 1670s and 1680s.

The Ancestry.com team used DNA analysis to make the connection, and it also combed through marriage and property records to trace President Obama's maternal ancestry to the time and place where Punch lived. The company says records suggest that Punch fathered children with a white woman, who passed her free status on to those children, giving rise to a family of a slightly different name, the Bunches, that spawned Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, 300 years later.

The findings come as more Americans are discovering their own mixed-race heritage. Research several years ago into First Lady Michelle Obama's ancestry revealed that she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of a young slave girl and an unknown white man.

Elizabeth Shown Mills, a former president of the American Society of Genealogists, says the Internet, coupled with the ease of DNA testing, is helping to reveal the extent of racial intermingling over the centuries.

"It is becoming increasingly common," for Americans to discover mixed-race ancestry, Mills says. "In the past, very few records were available. Very few people made the effort to do the research."

The Ancestry.com team spent two years examining Obama's mother's past, focusing on the mixed-race Bunch line. The researchers say...