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NEW YORK - It is a question that few thought a man aiming to be America's first black President would ever have to answer: Did your family once own slaves?
But that is the dilemma now facing Senator Barack Obama, who is bidding for the Democratic Party's 2008
presidential nomination, in part on the appeal of his bi-racial background.
As the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, Obama has seemed to embody a harmonious vision of America's melting pot. But recent revelations have thrown up an unexpected twist in the tale.
Obama's ancestors on his white mother's side appear to have been slave owners.
William Reitwiesner, an amateur genealogical researcher, traced Obama's maternal great-great-great-great-grandfather, George Washington Overall, and found that he owned two slaves in Kentucky: a 15-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man.
And he found out that Obama's maternal great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Duvall, also owned a pair of slaves listed in an 1850 census record. They were a 60-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman.
In fact, the Duvalls were a wealthy family whose members were descended from a major landowner, Maureen Duvall, whose estate owned at least 18 slaves in the 17th century.
Obama is engaged in a fierce battle with Senator Hillary Clinton to woo black voters in their bids to get the Democratic presidential nomination.
Both Clinton and Obama were due to appear overnight in Selma, Alabama, to mark the anniversary of a famous 1965 civil rights march.
It is not the best time to be exposed as the descendant of slave owners.
Reitwiesner has posted his research, which he warns is a "first draft", on his website, wargs.com.
He found that two other presidential candidates were also descendants of slave owners, Republican John McCain and Democrat John Edwards.
But the news is unlikely to be a serious political problem for Obama, despite the fact that some black commentators have accused him of not being a real black American.
Nor is he likely to be alone in finding out ancestral links to slave-owners.
America is caught in the grip of a frenzy of genealogical research.
Dozens of websites allow fast and easy access to all sorts of historical records, prompting many Americans to research their family trees.
It can throw up surprising results.
Civil rights campaigner the Reverend Al Sharpton was stunned to find his slave ancestors were owned by the late politician Strom Thurmond's family, who once ran for President on a staunchly racist segregationist platform. The pair might even be related.
Obama's campaign team have handled the news of his family's slaving past with pragmatism, saying such a family background was "representative of America".
But more edifying discoveries can come from looking at the past too.
Another of Obama's ancestors, his great-great-great-grandfather, Christopher Columbus Clark, fought for the Union army in the Civil War. As a result Obama can also lay claim to relatives who risked their lives to end slavery.
Perhaps it is just another case of Obama's complex past showing that he can have it both ways.
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