CNN 2012-08-02
时间：2018-12-24 作者：英语课 分类：CNN2012年(八)月
英语课
President Obama's story is well known. His father from Kenya, his mother from the United States, but ancestry 1.com says it has mapped out the Obama family tree going back 11 generations, with stunning 2 conclusion.
Anastasia Harman is the company's lead family historian.
Anastasia Harman: “Our conclusion is that President Obama, the first African-American president, is the 11th great grandson of the first documented enslaved African in what would become the United States.”
The link is made not from his father's side, but from his mother, Ann Dunham’s lineage. She was connected back to a man named John Punch. Records show Punch, who lived in Virginia, had children with a white woman. Those children later became known as the Bunch family. The findings of the two-year study are now posted on the company's web site. So how did the research team figure this out?
Anastasia Harman: “As we're going, you know, from President Obama to his mom and grandmother and great grandmother. You're looking for like birth and marriage and death records, all those kind of records. As we get further back in time, though they weren't kept or they've been destroyed over time. In the civil war a lot of records with destroyed, fires, floods, things like that. So we start looking at what we call surviving records, church records, and land records when we get really far back into that. Here's John Bunch III who's born in 1680, from here and out we're looking at lands records.”
University of Maryland history professor, Ira Berlin, says all of this is perfectly 3 plausible 4, because there was a time when white indentured 5 servants(契约佣工) and black slaves freely intermingled.
Ira Berlin: “They worked together. They sleep together. They play together. Eventually they have children together. The status of those children followed the status of their mother. That is if your mother is white then you will be free.”
Lineage has become a fascinating side topic of this political season from Mitt 6 Romney's morbid 7 roots to the president's ancestry. But what matters, says CNN contributor Roland Martin is not so much the past, but the future.
Roland Martin: “This is not going to mean anything when it comes to voters. This is simply a matter of what his personal history is. Keep in mind, you can be Clarence Thomas and you can have a very clear African-American background going back generations. But do the policies that you articulate today, do they resonate with black voters?”
1 ancestry
n.祖先，家世
- Their ancestry settled the land in 1856.他们的祖辈1856年在这块土地上定居下来。
- He is an American of French ancestry.他是法国血统的美国人。
2 stunning
adj.极好的；使人晕倒的
- His plays are distinguished only by their stunning mediocrity.他的戏剧与众不同之处就是平凡得出奇。
- The finished effect was absolutely stunning.完工后的效果非常美。
3 perfectly
adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地
- The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
- Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。
4 plausible
adj.似真实的，似乎有理的，似乎可信的
- His story sounded plausible.他说的那番话似乎是真实的。
- Her story sounded perfectly plausible.她的说辞听起来言之有理。
5 indentured
v.以契约束缚（学徒）( indenture的过去式和过去分词 )
- The Africans became indentured servants, trading labor for shelter and eventual freedom. 非洲人成为契约上的仆人，以劳力交换庇护及最终的自由。 来自互联网
- They are descendants of indentured importees. 他们是契约外来工的后代。 来自互联网