The Ethnically Diverse Santorum?

RICK SANTORUM: ETHNICALLY DIVERSE CANDIDATE?

Candidate’s family history may be giant melting pot

By S. Fox
Vivarium Press

(Philadelphia, PA) Diversity has become an important issue in every presidential race for years, none moreso during then-candidate Obama’s 2008 run. But if a Philadelphia family history society is correct, GOP contender and former Pennsylvania congressman Rick Santorum has an incredibly rich ethnic background in this state historically known for religious freedom that includes Native Americans, an ex-slave, Turkish would-be royalty, and even a little-known Appalachian culture called Melungeon.

According to John Grail, president of the Pennsylvania Genealogical and Historical Society in Philadelphia, the search for Santorum’s background started as a curious lark. In late 2011 some Internet blogs started questioning whether or not Santorum was a natural-born citizen due to having an Italian immigrant father—Grail admits he wasn’t certain whether the blogs were serious or satirical, but curiosity got the better of him.

One of the very first things that Grail discovered showed that Santorum’s ancestry goes way, way back. “One of Mr. Santorum’s matrilineal ancestors”—mother’s side, in Santorum’s case his mother being the former Catherine Dughi —“was a full-blooded Shawnee warrior named Teliskwatawa, nicknamed ‘Big Knife’. Big Knife was a notorious hunter of English scalps during the French and Indian War, starting when he, five other Shawnee, and four Frenchmen attacked the homestead of a family named Jemison near modern Chambersburg in 1758. Big Knife fought the English for years, but then after the war was baptized, married a French woman named Marie, and changed his name to John Kean. The name Kean, later spelled Keane, would stay in Santorum’s family until his grandmother, Mayme Keane.

“I’d say that pretty well settles whether or not Santorum and his family are either natural-born or native-born, which are often confused in the Obama debate,” Grail comments with a chuckle. “You don’t get much more natural-born in North America than that!”

(Native-born refers to someone born in the United States; the presidential requirement of being natural-born, according to federal law, means someone with one U.S. citizen parent who meets certain criteria, which Santorum’s mother does.)

Santorum’s grandmother, Mayme, also had a grandmother who was born a slave in northern Virginia, ironically near Santorum’s own birthplace of Winchester. Her name was Eula, and as a teenager living just south of the Pennsylvania border she made a flight for freedom in the early 1830s, after the Nat Turner Rebellion in Virginia made life vastly more harsh for slaves. She took the name Eula Hairston, apparently after a man who helped her along on what later would be called the Underground Railroad, and married into the Keane family.

Mayme Keane’s mother was likewise a Southerner who came North, albeit for different reasons. By all indications the young woman, Hattie Cumbow, was a Melungeon—an ethnic group in Appalachia with mysterious origins and who kept largely to themselves until the 1990s. Various theories about the Melungeons abound, but DNA testing seems to indicate that at least part of their ancestry is Turkish.

“It’s an intriguing story,” Grail explains. “In the 17th century some Spanish ships were damaged in a storm off the coast of South Carolina”—which Spain was exploring at the time—“and in order to get home they marooned their Turkish servants and slaves. Apparently these Turks occasionally intermingled with the Indians, but many of them and their descendants stayed as a cohesive unit, so that Melungeon slang is still peppered with Turkish words.”

Why Hattie left Tennessee for Pennsylvania is unclear, though it wasn’t uncommon for mountaineers to migrate to more populated areas looking for work. “Hattie, who eventually married a Keane too, wouldn’t have been any different from thousands of others leaving Appalachia for work,” Grail said, “except that she would likely have had swarthy skin and strikingly blue eyes, both of which are common features among Melungeons to this day.”

Turkish ancestry shows up on Santorum’s father’s side too, Grail continues with infectious enthusiasm. “Some people get into genealogy looking for royalty, and some for adventure stories,” he says, “but on his father’s side, Mr. Santorum has a little of both.”

After Mehmed the Conquerer, the Ottoman Turkish ruler who destroyed the Byzantine Empire in 1453 and invaded Italy in the following years, died in 1481, a war of succession broke out. For awhile the throne of the Ottoman Empire was held by one Cem Sultan with the Pope’s blessing, but he was deposed and fled to the Kingdom of Naples in Italy, where his male descendants were known as the “Principe de Sayd” for generations. In the early 19th century, however, after much of northern Italy became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—which was friendly to Turkish Muslims—a female descendant named Ozlem fled to a town near Venice called Riva del Garda. There she married one Angelo Santorum—Rick Santorum’s great-great-grandfather—and presumably converted to Christianity, though there are no surviving records indicating a baptism.

Santorum’s father, the late Aldo Santorum, immigrated to the U.S. from Riva del Garda at the age of 7, and later served in the U.S. army during World War Two.

“A lot of people who explore their family history only look for names and dates,” Grail concludes. “But Mr. Santorum’s background demonstrates that the true enjoyment is finding the treasures of your family’s stories. And I suspect Mr. Santorum has plenty of adventures in his past.”