‘No proof Kamala Harris is descended from Irish slave owner’
Genealogist who found Biden’s and Obama’s roots dismisses link
THE genealogist who discovered the Irish ancestors of Joe Biden and Barack Obama says she can’t find any record that Kamala Harris is descended from a notorious Co. Antrim-born slave owner.
Megan Smolenyak – who worked on the celebrity-roots series Who Do You Think You Are? – has described reports linking the US vice president to the 19th-century Jamaican plantation owner, Hamilton Brown, as ‘twisted attempts to weaponise Kamala Harris’s family tree’.
Digital archives, DNA testing, and TV shows dedicated to digging into previous generations have made finding ancestors easier than ever before but records can still be sketchy or unreliable or not there at all depending on the century.
Speaking on the phone from the US this week, Ms Smolenyak, known for her meticulous research, said she has failed to find records proving the family connection between Kamala Harris and the Irish slave owner who actively fought against abolition.
She said: ‘He was really aggressive about fighting emancipation and that puts him in his own special category.
‘Although I can’t prove it, I have very few doubts that he did rape some of those he enslaved. No doubt, unfortunately, his DNA is floating out there but it’s one thing to know that on an intellectual level and to claim it with regard to somebody who might become the next president of the United States.
‘There is no paper-trail proof at all. I didn’t get to just claim Barack Obama was from Moneygall, I had to prove it.’
As Ms Harris’s heritage was questioned this week by Donald Trump, the genealogist said the topic has become even more relevant.
‘We’re the so-called melting pot. We’re all different nationalities. To be part Indian and part Jamaican is very America. I’m half Irish and half Slavic.’
She said trolls and extremists are trying to weaponise the alleged slave owner connection in the election campaign.
‘What we’re dealing with is click-bait garbage that tries to blame Kamala Harris for the barbarity some of her female ancestors somehow survived,’ she said on her website.
The reports of the relationship originate with Ms Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris, who stated, ‘My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town)’ in an article in Jamaica Global in 2020.
In relation to stories passed down through the generations, Ms Smolenyak said this week: ‘We all get told these stories and sometimes there is some truth to it and sometimes there is not.
‘There is obviously an element of truth. The family was from Brown’s Town but, as you might imagine, Brown’s Town was full of people using the name Brown, and even the name Hamilton. That turned into both a surname and a first name, and there are tons of people with that.’
She said she found seven possible candidates when she trawled
for a record of the birth of Kamala Harris’s great-grandmother, Christiana Brown, between 1875 and 1890 in St Ann Parish where Brown’s Town is situated.
‘I’ve had a go and I keep on coming up with theories but one of the problems is there are just so many people with the same name from the same place.’
She said it is clear that Hamilton Brown was a ‘notorious slave owner’ from the slave schedules carried out at his plantation every three years in the decades before the abolition of slavery in 1838.
‘You can see how many he enslaved in 1817, 1820, 1823, 1826, 1829 and 1832. In each case, he
enslaved over 100 individuals,’ she said.
Ms Smolenyak, who also found the real identity of Annie Moore, the 17-yearold Irish girl who was Ellis Island’s first immigrant, said it is highly unlikely that Hamilton Brown would have been recorded as the father of the child of a slave.
‘Even when enslavers did bother to record births of new slaves, they often recorded the name of the mother. It was rare to record the name of the father.’
She said some fact-checkers looking into the relationship have tried to ‘reverse-research it, starting with the past and working forward, but you don’t get to do that. You have to work back one generation at a time and prove every parent and child link’.
She said there is ‘every chance it can’t be proved’ even if the Harris family tried DNA testing to
‘We’re dealing with click-bait garbage’
‘It was rare to record the name of the father’
confirm the link to Hamilton Brown, who died in 1843.
‘Once you get past five generations or so it becomes really tricky and you’d have to test a whole bunch of people.’ On the phone this week, she added: ‘I’m not saying hey look, I have this figured out. I’m saying I haven’t figured this out and neither has anybody else.’