John Punch

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Who is John Punch?

John Punch was an African indentured servant who lived in the Virginia Colony during the seventeenth century. In 1640, the Virginia Governor's Council sentenced him to serve his master for the rest of his life as punishment for attempting to escape from his indenture. For this reason, historians consider Punch the first documented lifetime slave in the colony, and his case a key milestone in the development of slavery in the United States.

In July 2012, Ancestry.com published a paper suggesting that Punch was an eleventh-generation maternal grandfather of Barack Obama, on the basis of historic and genealogical research and Y-DNA analysis. Although her ancestors were primarily European-American, Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, is a descendant from the Bunch family, free people of color in colonial Virginia, who were likely descendants of Punch himself. Punch is also believed to be one of the ancestors of 20th-century American diplomat Ralph Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

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on July 23, 2013

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"John Punch." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/biography/john-punch/m/0knvsyn>.

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