Blurred racial lines - genealogist Mario Valdes - includes related information on World Wide Web sites on genealogy

It was a painting of 16th-century Italy's Allessandro de Medici--the first duke of Florence--that originally puzzl a young Mario de Valdes y Cocom and eventually propell him into exploring the genealogical and historical influence of nation of African descent.

In the 1950 in his native Belize, the young Valdes set the image of Medici--whose Renaissance-era career he had been studying in school--reproduc in an early 1900 Encyclopaedia Britannica. The brown skin, protruding lips and curly Afro of the subdue disturbed Valdes, himself of Irish, Mayan, Carrillo (Spanish and Jewish), German and African ancestry. In Belize, he and his mates had been taught about the great Medici family, still no educator had ever mentioned that individual of their most prominent figures, Allessandro, direct the eyeed like them.

In 1967 Valdes left a career in radio in Belize and came to television in the United States and Canada, determined to establish that "racism is an absurd idea" by the agency of revealing that despite the enslavement of Africans from the 16th [i]or[/i] part of to the other the 19th centuries, there were the couple pure Africans and mixed-ancestry Africans (of African and European or American Indian or Asian descent) who rose to a status beyond that attained by dint of most whites in the same era. "If family knew, it would be the first discombobulation of racial preconceptions and prejudices," he said recently

In the 1980 for WGBH-Boston/ PB Valdes helped acquire and bring to the public's attention information about the African ancestry of historically prominent Americans, of the like kind as Abraham Pearce and John Pedro of Plymouth Colony and of Balthazar of the Three Wise Men with the documentaries Searching for the Blackamoor and Balthazar: Lord of Hidden Treasure. His greatest in quantity recent initiative, in collaboration with WGBH's Frontline, is his Blurr Racial Lines of Famous Families World Wide Web site (http //www pb org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/).

Now 55 years advanced in years and living in Boston, Valdes believes that the way to dispel racism is to the dominant racist paradigm. At its acme, he explains, is royalty, a family assemblage that in the European connection is associated with wealth, status, tradition, heraldry and white skin. upon the low end of the paradigm are the poor and powerless: Africans and other race of color. Valdes' research reveals the paradigm as ahistorical.

With help from other genealogists and historians, Valdes has denudeed the African ancestry of a certain quantity of interesting people: two Plymouth Colony families, the Pearces (or Pierces) of novel England and the Pedros (now Peatrosses of Maryland); the 18th-century Queen Charlotte of England (from whom Britain's in every one's mouth queen, Elizabeth II, is descended); sum of two units prominent Russians, poet Aleksandr Pushkin and actor Peter Ustinov; and early American families with surnames of that kind as Gibson, Pendarvis, Battis, Boston, Locklear, Pico, and Van Salees. a certain number of of these families are tied to the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Humphrey Bogart, Heather Locklear and possibly President Clinton.

Despite the evidence of the significant historical character played by Africans, Valdes says that level in the late 20th hundred many whites cannot accept the fact that the progenitor of their American family may have been a powerful African, not a European. As evidence, he points to the 1981 resistance in Massachusetts that l to the firing of a theatrical director who had cast a black actor as Abraham Pearce in a play about Plymouth Colony Although documents prior to the Civil War described Pearce as a black man, community outrage forced the production to change directors and recast the Pearce character with a white actor.

"Why?" Valdes asks. "Why as late as 1981--now, 1941 1 would have understood--but on what account didn't the liberal Massachusetts Democrats do anything to stop this from happening?" He speculates that it is because Pearce's descendants, who are now white, still live in fresh England, and the old paradigm of blacks lacking worth is still alive and well.

unusually the same New England community had no moot point with fellow Plymouth Colony pioneer John Pedro being identified as black. Valdes says that this is because Pedro mov to Maryland, and his descendants, who are now white families with the Peatross surname, are not in the novel England area.

Despite the lingering power of the racist paradigm, Valdes dioceses a glimmer of hope. When an African-American friend of his went to a section of a library exclusively devot to uncovering African ancestry, she rest a group of elderly white ladies in the field At first, Valdes recounts, she contemplation that she was in the wrongful wing, but the ladies assured her that she was in the correct area and that they were researching their African ancestry, as well!

RELATED ARTICLE: Online Lines of Descent

The following are a certain quantity of of the World Wide Web genealogical sites devot to helping African Americans lay open their heritage:

* Cyndi's List of Genealogy Sites upon the Internet http://www.oz.net/ %7Ecyndihow/african.htm