Beto O’Rourke’s ancestors were slaveholders, records reveal

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke recently delivered an impassioned speech while meeting with the Gullah-Geechee Nation, an organization of African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved on plantations from Florida to South Carolina.

However, O’Rourke has never publicly shared the slave-owning story of some of his own family.

O’Rourke is listed as a member on Ancestry.com, where abundant documentation exists of his and his wife Amy’s ancestors’ slave-owning and their support for the Confederacy. In his writings and media interviews, however, O’Rourke has dealt only with kin who lived too late to have fought for the south in the American civil war, or to have been slave masters.

In an interview, O’Rourke said that he and his wife knew nothing about their ancestral ties to the Confederacy and slave holding until he was contacted by the Guardian.

To read the rest of this article, go to: Beto O’Rourke’s ancestors were slaveholders, records reveal, by Debbie Nathan, for The Guardian. CTTT Exec Director Tom DeWolf was interviewed for this story regarding CTTT’s approach to the importance of genealogical research and reparations.