Bush family descended from a "notorious slave trader"

[Mr. Morden]

Based on new genealogical research:

link

[Lief 🗽]

Makes sense. Remember Yeezy's words of wisdom!

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Prescott Bush and George Walker were notorious traders with Nazi Germany. Pretty scummy family altogether.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

I think Obama, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and all of the other Presidents are descended from slave owners. I am sure I am. I don't see the big deal. Some Presidents even owned slaves.

[Mr. Morden]

I think Obama, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and all of the other Presidents are descended from slave owners. I am sure I am. I don't see the big deal. Some Presidents even owned slaves.

It was already known that the Bushes were descended from slave owners.  The new part here is that they're also descended from a slave *trader*.

Of course it's not a big deal.  Just a historical curiosity.

[pbrower2a]

If one has aristocratic ancestry, then one probably is descended from slave owners. This applies to most early settlers of either New England or Virginia.

But the crimes of an ancestor do not pass onto descendant. This is a recent discovery. s

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

I think Obama, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, and all of the other Presidents are descended from slave owners. I am sure I am. I don't see the big deal. Some Presidents even owned slaves.

It was already known that the Bushes were descended from slave owners.  The new part here is that they're also descended from a slave *trader*.

Of course it's not a big deal.  Just a historical curiosity.

I understand that it is not a big deal...yet. There are many reasons to hate the Bushes, but this is not one of them. None the less, this is a really interesting find.

[MaxQue]

I'm pretty than everybody can find some awful criminal in their family.

[Queen Mum Inks.LWC]

I thought this was already known?  Or perhaps I'm just thinking of being descended from a slave owner (virtually everybody).

[badgate]

I have an ancestor who was part of the founding of Norwich, Connecticut. Or maybe it was Saybrook. I don't know.

[LastVoter]

Well of course, the rich reproduce and the working class continues to perish, so almost everyone will have a few rich family members if you look back far enough.

[politicus]

They descend from a prominet abolitionist on the Bush side so mixed bag regarding slavery. 

But slave trading is worse than slave owning. The latter was part of the normal economic structure, while even at the time slave trading was considered a cruel business.

[tmthforu94]

Meh - I have a cousin in jail for trapping a couple in a car and blowing it up. I'd be ticked if I ever ran for office and that came up against me, as I never even really knew him.

[Hash]

I'm pretty sure I could find some distant relative from the 1940s who collaborated with the Nazis during the War. Which is worse than having a slave trader ancestor in the 1700s.

[pbrower2a]

If you are of German or Austrian origin, then you probably have some Nazi war criminals as distant relatives. Heck, I have ancestors named Hess (as in Rudolf, official party leader before he made a mad flight to Britain) and Funk (as in Walther, who established press censorship and served as the fence for loot stolen from inmates of concentration camps -- such as gold from extracted teeth). Those ancestors were Swiss, but one never knows.

If you have relatives in southern Italy, then you might have mobsters as distant relatives even if you absolutely loathe the Mafia. East-European Jews? You may be a sober liberal and a business owner and thoroughly hate Bolshevism, but many of the Bolsheviki were renegade Jews.

Now here is a kicker: practically no descendant of black slaves in the United States is without some white ancestry from pre-Civil-War times -- and the white ancestor was usually either a member of a slave-owning family or a white overseer who raped a slave woman.

OK -- I hate two of my ancestors for deeds other than marital infidelity or neglect of children -- the English king who ordered Jews to wear yellow stars that signaled them for murder if they chose to stay in England without converting to Christianity and eventually made England Judenrein for several centuries. I hate the Crusader "king" who became little more than a pirate who preyed upon Muslim caravans and whom Saladin eventually caught and beheaded in the presence of another captive Crusader soldier whom Saladin refused to pardon -- because that captive had never done anything wrong, he did not need to be pardoned. Those two thugs are ancestors, and if your ancestors were among the earliest English settlers of Massachusetts or Virginia. I would rather claim the just and decent Saladin.

[Insula Dei]

I'm pretty than everybody can find some awful criminal in their family.

I wonder. I have some 10,000 years of land-less farmers, miners and manual workers before me. One wonders what capacity for immorality those lives ultimately held. Maybe a little bawdy drunkenness, some petty adultery, but I can't really imagine anything that I should be horrified to find out.

[Lief 🗽]

Yeah, my ancestors, from what I can tell, were landless farmers and domestic servants. One was a Jewish maid raped/seduced (not really sure which) by the man of the house she worked in in like the 1800s (so I'm descended at some point (like great-great-grandparent) from a bastard). One also fought in the Kriegsmarine in WW2, but he wasn't a Nazi or anything (I think his sister was married to a Jewish man and was actually sent to a concentration camp).

I guess one of the nice things about being descended from poors is that your ancestors never committed any horrible atrocities probably.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

do poor people never murder or abuse?  in any case, there's always been change between social classes, so if you go back far enough you're going to find someone who was relatively rich or politically powerful.

[memphis]

If your family has been here long enough, you can easily have several hundred direct ancestors who lived in  slavery times. To say nothing of uncles, cousins, etc. It was a very common industry. The odds you wouldn't have somebody involved is pretty remote.

[tpfkaw]

Prescott Bush and George Walker were notorious traders with Nazi Germany. Pretty scummy family altogether.

Prescott Bush was a member of the board of directors (an essentially honorary position in a private institution) of a bank owned by Fritz Thyssen of being imprisoned in Dachau fame, and didn't formally resign his position during the war.  There are many reasons to dislike him, I'd say playing one of the principal roles in inflicting Wendell Willkie on America is my biggest one, but "trading with Nazi Germany" is not one of them.

[Lief 🗽]

do poor people never murder or abuse?  in any case, there's always been change between social classes, so if you go back far enough you're going to find someone who was relatively rich or politically powerful.

They, by definition, generally lack the power for murder and abuse on a large scale.

I agree with your second point.

[minionofmidas]

How can this be news? The scumbag both Presidents Bush are named for was notorious even in his own time and we're talking of his ancestor in the parental line.

Does some reading... I suppose the answer lies in that born-the-year-his-father-died bit in 1797, plus the fact that Walker is a very common name. And George Walker lost his Maryland plantation somewhere along the way and ended his days as a simple farmer in Southern Illinois. The Walker Nouveau Riche fortune was only made by his son and does not derive from the slave trade in any way.


I think George Orwell's great-great-grandfather Charles Blair, he who from obscure Scottish beginnings made a fortune in Jamaica and married into the English aristocracy, was also a slave trader.

[John Dibble]

As has been said, it's nothing more than a historical curiosity. People should be judged on their own character, not the character of their ancestors.

[LastVoter]

do poor people never murder or abuse?  in any case, there's always been change between social classes, so if you go back far enough you're going to find someone who was relatively rich or politically powerful.

Well yes, that's why many blacks are related to slaveowners in US(the upper class males had more kids, which were often illegitimate and thrown into the working classes).

[pbrower2a]

Well, I just found that I am related to Frank and Jesse James.

Look deeply enough in genealogy, take some chances, and you might find Charles Dickens, Charles Ives,  Thomas Edison, Katherine Hepburn, and Lucille Ball. I have found two Baseball Hall of Fame members -- Ed Roush and Harmon Killebrew as direct relatives and Joe DiMaggio as a relative by marriage to a distant relative (Marilyn Monroe). Through Marilyn I also get Norman Mailer, a fine author.  

John Dillinger is not welcome to my family tree. Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, W E B DuBois, and Lena Horne would be.