Posted by
Mike on Thursday, August 25, 2011 8:59:47 PM
http://www.westernperspective.blogspot.com/
My belated condolences who died last year.
Some Washingtonians may have known him through his menial employment in the Library of Congress. His spare time was occupied in doing genealogical research as his grandfather had done in prior years. Among other discoveries, he found that some of Barack Obama's ancestors were slaveholders.
Our paths crossed although we never actually met only because we share a particular ancestral line, that of de Bassy from the Italian nobility. They go back, through a lucky marriage to a d'Adhémar lady, to the old higher nobility of Europe, even including Rome and Constantinople. His branch was that of Vignolles through marriage, leaving southeast France after Louis XIV withdrew the Edict of Nantes in 1685, eventually winding up in Dublin, with descendants settling throughout the British Empire. My branch descends from de Bassy of Berus in Lorraine, ennobled in 1523 at Regensburg by Emperor Karl V.