Category Archives: Obsessions

I’ve told Mr. B. that he can legitimately claim an African-American ancestor. It would work as an Affirmative Action gambit these days if that should ever be needed. IF, that is, we buy into (or pretend to) the widespread claim that South Carolina planter/slave owner Gideon Gibson was a mulatto.

He was, indisputably as far as my family is concerned, our six greats uncle because we descend from his sister Hannah Gibson and her daughter Marcia Saunders Murphee.

Marcia (nicknamed Massey) married Claudius Pegues III Jr., a disabled Revolutionary War veteran and my four greats grandfather whom my late mother (and subsequently one of her granddaughters) used to establish membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Although if mother knew anything about Hannah and Gideon Gibson she never spoke of them to me. Neither the African nor a possible Jewish connection would have appealed to her, to put it politely.

I prefer the claim that these Gibsons (sometimes spelled Gupson) were, in fact, Sephardic Jews, possibly originally from Portugal. Not that such exalted sources as PBS and Tulane University would necessarily agree. Indeed, large numbers of African Americans claim descent from Gideon and we know what openly daring to disagree with black people will get you nowadays.

But genealogy is very far from an exact science, and other than establishing a link to a person, old (and frequently misspelled) public and private records are at best ambiguous—we have no idea, for instance, whether Gideon called himself a mulatto, or whether some officious British colonial clerk decided he was one based on his skin color, hair texture and/or facial features.

We do know that Gideon carried documents proving he was a free man, because he showed them to the then governor of South Carolina (1740s), which was duly recorded, but the documents could as easily have been his release from indentured servitude—rather common in his time—as any manumission from slavery.

So we are pretty much left to believe what we like. And what I like is the idea that Gideon and Hannah Gibson were not half or less Africans at all but Melungeon Jews, Sephardics in flight (and often in secret) from the Catholic Inquisition which had driven their ancestors from Spain and Portugal.

Although I’m sure the African claim would make a much better Affirmative Action gambit than the Jewish one.