Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandmom was a slave girl

In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions, including a six-year-old slave girl who was then valued at $475. That girl eventually turned out to be US first lady Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandmom.

In his will, the slave girl was simply described as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason — this union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

According to The Times, Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama.

Viewed by many as a powerful symbol of black advancement, Michelle Obama grew up with only a vague sense of her ancestry, aides and relatives said.

During the presidential campaign, the family learned about one paternal great-great-grandfather, a former slave from South Carolina, but the rest of Obama’s roots were a mystery.

Now the more complete map of  Obama’s ancestors — including the slave mother, white father and their biracial son, Dolphus T. Shields — for the first time fully connects the first African-American first lady to the history of slavery, tracing their five-generation journey from bondage to a front-row seat to the presidency.

The findings — uncovered by Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist, and The New York Times — substantiate what Obama has called longstanding family rumours about a white forebear.

While president Obama’s biracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans.

Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.