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Surprises in the Family Tree
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By MITCHEL OWENS
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JOHN ARCHER first appears in Northampton County, Va., in the mid-17th century. He started a family that prospered, fought in the Revolutionary War and built a mansion. Generations later, Archer's blood trickled down to me. It mingled in my veins with DNA from a gravedigger in 17th-century Württemberg, Germany; from an Appalachian clan with a recessive gene that turns their skins indigo blue; and from a rich young widow in Jamestown, Va., whose fickle heart led to America's first breach-of-promise suit, in 1623.

I have been researching my past for two decades, since I was in high school, so finding a new ancestor is hardly startling. Learning about John Archer three years ago, however, was startling. He was black, a slave or indentured servant freed around 1677. I am white. That's what it says on my birth certificate. Now I know better, thanks to Paul Heinegg.

A retired oil-refinery engineer in Collegeville, Pa., Mr. Heinegg, who is white, has compliled genealogies of 900 mixed-race families who lived freely in slaveholding states in "Free African Americans of North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia" and "Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware." (The information posed on a Web site, www.freeafricanamericans.com.)

Mr. Heinegg's research offers evidence that most free African-American and biracial families resulted not from a master and his slave, like Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but from a white woman and an African man: slave, freed slave or indentured servent.

"Most of the workers in colonial America in the 17th and early 18th centures were indentured servants, white and black," said Dr John B. Boles,

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