Former President Jimmy Carter could trace his family history back centuries, through an ancestral line that included cotton planterscombonanza casino, Quakers, a spy for George Washington at Valley Forge and, of course, Georgia peanut farmers.
But perhaps the most surprising relation in Mr. Carter’s extended family tree is Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown — the Detroit musical empire that blossomed in the 1960s and ’70s with Black pop superstars like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Jackson 5.
According to a detailed family history compiled by Jeff Carter, one of the president’s sons, the two men were connected through a common ancestor in 19th-century Georgia: a white plantation owner named James Thomas Gordy, who fathered a child with a woman he held in slavery.
On a number of more specific points, however, Harris and Trump have offered clues to their policy priorities that provide insights into how each might govern should they win.
But the first two days of a formal hearing by a Coast Guard panel into the disaster, which began Monday, have raised basic questions about that grim conclusion and taken detailed testimony that supports an unsensational finding.
That child, born around 1854, was named Berry Gordy; the Detroit music impresario, whose full name is Berry Gordy Jr., is his grandson. Through the children he had with his wife, James Thomas Gordy was also the grandfather of President Carter’s mother, who was born Lillian Gordy.
ImageMr. Gordy at the piano with Motown stars including Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder.Credit...Steve Kagan/Getty ImagesReadily available documentation from the 19th century, including census records and slave schedules, do not prove a blood relation conclusively, according to genealogists. But the connection is accepted by both families. Mr. Gordy, now 95, said he discussed it with the former president — who died on Sunday at age 100 — while Mr. Carter was campaigning for re-election.
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