Melvinia "Mattie" Shields

Ancestor of Michelle Obama (Robinson), First Lady.

• Residence: 1850 - Spartanburg county, Spartanburg, South Carolina, United States
• Residence: From 1852 - Clayton, Georgia, United States
• Residence: 1870 - Georgia, United States
• Residence: 1900 - Militia District 352, Kingston Kingston town, Bartow, Georgia, United States
• Residence: 1910 - Kingston, Bartow, Georgia, United States
• Residence: 1920 - Kingston, Bartow, Georgia, United States
• Residence: 1930 - Kingston, Bartow, Georgia, United States
  • Reference: FamilySearch Family Tree - SmartCopy: Apr 26 2020, 7:32:28 UTC

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“An important message in this… is that we are all linked.” •• Michelle Obama

Born a slave in South Carolina, Melvinia was bequeathed to Henry Shields, who lived in Clayton County, Georgia. At age 16, Melvinia gave birth to a son Dolphus Shield s, who was fathered by Henry’s son Charles. Melvinia eventually moved to Kingston, Georgia where she spent the remainder of her life working as a midwife. In Kingston, residents knew her fondly as “Mattie” McGruder.

Dolphus Shields moved to Birmingham and became a successful businessman. Later Dolphus’ descendants settled in Chicago, where his great-great-granddaughter, Michelle Robinson was born. Michelle married Barack Obama, who was elected President of the United States in 2008, serving two terms in office. A marker is placed in honor of Melvinia Shields at Queens Chapel Methodist Church Cemetery, where First Lady Michelle Obama’s great-great-great grandmother was laid to rest in 1938.

https://visitcartersvillega.org/melvinia-shields-the-white-house/

Close Read: A Slave and Her Children.

“Out of all Michelle’s roots, it’s Melvinia who is screaming to be found,” Megan Smolenyak, a genealogist who worked with the Times to trace our First Lady’s ancestry, said. In 1852, Melvinia was a slave in South Carolina and eight years old—the same age, as it happens, that her descendant Sasha Obama is now—when her owner died and she was handed over to new ones in Georgia. When she was “perhaps as young as 15,” she gave birth to a son, Dolphus Shields. He and three siblings who followed would be listed as “mulatto”—their father may have been Melvinia’s owner, or one of his sons, but at any rate a white man. Dolphus is Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather.

That one of Michelle Obama’s ancestors was white is not news in itself; she said, in a Washington _Post I don’t raise it to highlight anyone’s ignorance, or to browbeat people, or argue for Black History Month starting in January. I raise it because this is as much about my ignorance as yours. Put bluntly—I thought you knew.

Harriet Hemings, Sally Hemings’s daughter, was born while her father (and the evidence is pretty much irrefutable that he was her father), Thomas Jefferson, was serving as President, so these stories are not new to the White House, either. Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello,” asked by the Times to weigh in on Michelle Obama’s family tree, wrote that our “tangled blood lines” refute “the popular notion that we’re living in a brand new age of interracial mixing.”

And yet, there is much more, and much that is fascinating, in the Times story, as there is in the stories of many families. We have barely delved the complexity of our past. In many ways, the most moving passage in the piece is this:

But sometime in her 30s or 40s, census records show, Melvinia broke away and managed to reunite with former slaves from her childhood on the Patterson estate: Mariah and Bolus Easley, who settled with Melvinia in Bartow County, near the Alabama border…. A community “that had been ripped apart was somehow pulling itself back together,” Ms. Smolenyak said of the group in Bartow County.

Melvinia lived into her nineties. She was known as Mattie McGruder when she died, in 1938.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/close-read-a-slave-and-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KupecreikW4

Mother of Dolphius Theodore Shields (1859-1950). She lived in SC until moving to Georgia in 1850.∼Father of her child: Charles Marion Shields (White Slave Owner) July 16, 1839 d. Jan 24, 1916 Buried in McDonough Cemetery, Georgia.
findagrave.com # 31556362...

Child: Adolphus D. T. Shields born Apr 10, 1859 Kingston, Bartow Co., Georgia - died June 30, 1950 Birmingham, Jefferson Co., Alabama - Burial: Shadowlawn Memorial Park, Birmingham, Jefferson Co., Alabama, U.S.A.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/42859645/melvinia-shields

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Aug 8 2023, 19:37:39 UTC