http://www.ancestry.com/obama
Conclusion: The Bunch Progenitor and Immigrant
Due to the destruction of records, no one can definitively prove or disprove the conclusion that John Punch was President Obama’s immigrant ancestor. One can only come to the most logical conclusion based on the evidence that does survive and compare that conclusion to possible alternative explanations. Parsimony is the first basis that should be used to determine a final conclusion.
Research was conducted with the highest standards, exhausting what has survived, properly interpreting it in the light of the law, correlating the whole, and resolving conflicting data. There is no substitute for the expertise decades of experience working with the same families and records in this period provides. Short of finding John Punch’s body, digging it up and conducting yDNA tests, one could never be 100 percent certain of relationship.
Of what can research be absolutely certain? It is certain that Paul Bunch and John Bunch II are brothers who had a father of Sub-Saharan heritage who resided in Virginia in the 1650s. It is also certain that the Virginia Bunch progenitor was among the first Africans who settled in the Virginia colony,64 and was among the first hundred or so Africans brought to the shores of Virginia.
Taking the whole into account, exhaustive research in surviving records justifies a conclusion that John Punch was the progenitor of the Bunch family. He is the only known African man of that time and place with a name in any way equivalent to Bunch, an extraordinarily rare surname in England and America. He lived in the same locale as Paul and John Bunch II at a time the African-American population was extremely small. It just happens that he is also the first known African-American male sentenced to servitude for life. Only history could assert such irony in a profoundly powerful way—that the first African-American President, Barack Obama, would also be the 11th great-grandson of the first African to be enslaved for life in America.