President Barack Obama’s family has been linked to Sarah Palin, Brad Pitt and both Presidents Bush. Now there are evidence that the president might be connected to the first documented African lave in revolutionary America. Obama Connection

According to documents and research made by Ancestry.com, which is said to be the largest online family history resource, the first indentured African American slave is an ancestor of President Obama’s mother. Joseph Shumway, a genealogist from Ancestry.com, said that two of the most significant Africans in the nation are directly related to each other.

Shumway was part of a team who worked more than 500 hours to establish the connection between President Obama’s family and that of John Punch, a servant who was sentence to a life of slavery after trying to escape in revolutionary Virginia.

The researchers discovered the new connection to President Obama’s African roots via an unlikely link, which is his Caucasian mother. President Obama’s African American roots had previously been related to his father’s Kenyan birth.

The new connection was discovered by the genealogists as they pour through documents tracing Stanley Ann Durham’s ancestors. They found a connection to the Bunch family through recently published DNA evidence that stated they had roots in sub-Saharan Africa.

This started the genealogists’ interest in tracing President Obama’s roots in the revolutionary-era African American community. One of the obstacles they faced was the records lost or destroyed over the last three hundred years. They had to piece together clues to get to the facts.

In an instance, a researcher had to use land records together with the knowledge that in order to buy land in revolutionary America a man must be at least 21 years old. They used this to know the age of a particular descendent. Through these bits of evidence, the genealogists were able to connect the president’s lineage to a Caucasian family in revolutionary Virginia named Bunch. They came to a conclusion that the Caucasian Bunch was related to African American John Punch.