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<\/a>(The book: All Is Never Said) – Ancestors Edwin Durock Turpin, his wife Anna Elizabeth CochranTurpin and their two children Martha Jane, left, and Edwin Durock Jr. circa 1874.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n She was honoring William Turpin\u2019s son, Edwin, Jefferson\u2019s second cousin, who purchased a slave, Mary, and married her in Canada. The two lived in neighboring houses on a plantation in Goochland County, Va. The houses were burned when word got out, and then were rebuilt, according to a family memoir. Before his death in 1868, Edwin wrote in a will that the children he had with \u201cmy woman Mary\u201d were to be free.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat I\u2019m going to think about as I walk down that aisle is Edwin and Mary rebuilding that house,\u201d Raney said as she prepared for the DAR ceremony honoring national defense, where an Army band played \u201cThis Is My Country.\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll think about those torches. I\u2019m doing this for my family.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Raney, a systems engineer and mathematician with degrees from Spelman College and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, talks less about Jefferson than about the couple who intertwined her black family\u2019s line with that of the Turpins. She\u2019s the leader of the Fort Washington chapter of the DAR,\u00a0Harmony Hall<\/span><\/a>, and is credited with saving it from being dissolved by recruiting younger women as older members passed away.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI have no doubt in my mind she will move on to become a state officer or national officer\u201d in the DAR, said Dorothy Weberling, 64, a former leader of Harmony Hall who processed Raney\u2019s application. \u201cShe\u2019s just that smart.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s no doubting that Raney belongs, said Weberling, who\u2019s white. \u201cThe ladies who\u2019ve accepted her are all college women. They have a greater understanding of history and what actually happened. What we\u2019re bringing out into the open is that white men and black women did have relationships. It\u2019s better to bring the secrets out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s rare that black family history such as Raney\u2019s is unearthed, traced and documented, historians said. It\u2019s rarer still when it\u2019s linked to a storied family with power, privilege and a celebrated legacy. Jefferson\u2019s intimate relationship with his young slave, Sally Hemings, is one of a few.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly<\/span><\/a>, 66, a genealogist and writer who joined the DAR nine years ago and became the first black woman to start a chapter last year, in Queens, said the group has changed. \u201cNot everybody is going to hug you, but I\u2019ve never felt discrimination in any way, I can honestly say that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The DAR is trying to strengthen its ties to nonwhite women in other ways. In the 1980s, it started\u00a0Forgotten Patriots,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0a project that works to identify black and Native American men who fought in the Revolutionary War, so that descendants can more easily link to them.<\/span><\/p>\n The project sometimes shines a light on long-hidden relationships between slaveholders and slaves. The \u201cDAR is trying to make its records accurate to show the true history of the situation,\u201d said Eric Grundset, its library director.<\/span><\/p>\n New England states have the best 18th-century records because \u201cthey used a lot of color descriptions,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the further south you go, the worse it gets.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Raney heard family members in Maryland talk about links to Thomas Jefferson\u2019s relatives but paid it little mind.<\/span><\/p>\n A distant cousin in Louisiana, Odette Harper Hines, 100, provided an oral history, \u201cAll Is Never Said<\/span><\/a>,\u201d that detailed Edwin and Mary Turpin\u2019s story as passed down by elderly family members, but Raney still didn\u2019t quite believe.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2006, that changed. She watched \u201cAfrican American Lives<\/span><\/a>,\u201d a show in which Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. traced the histories of famous people. As soon as it ended, she called genealogy company\u00a0African Ancestry<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to submit a DNA test, hoping to find her origin \u201csomewhere in Africa.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n A sequence of\u00a0DNA tests<\/span><\/a>\u00a0placed her ancestors in Mali and other west African countries, but also contained a surprise \u2014 she was 30 percent European.<\/span><\/p>\n Digging deeper, she spent thousands of dollars ordering more DNA tests for herself, her mother, Carolyn, and her father, Robert.<\/span><\/p>\n Her father\u2019s result, which came in the middle of the DAR\u2019s months-long process of certifying her family tree, \u201cblew my mind,\u201d Raney said. He was 64 percent European.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cMy dad,\u201d she said, \u201cwas a white man.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt blew my mind, too,\u201d Robert Raney said in a telephone interview from his home in Suffolk, Va. He strongly identifies as black because of culture and the way he looks. \u201cI was the darkest person in my family. At one time, I thought I was adopted,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n Family documents played a role in the DAR\u2019s certification, too. Augustus Granger, Raney\u2019s third cousin, has researched the family\u2019s history for 20 years.<\/span><\/p>\n Edwin Turpin bought a farm in Goochland County once owned by his famous second cousin, Thomas Jefferson. In the will in which Turpin declared his children free, he also left them all his possessions.<\/span><\/p>\n Edwin\u2019s and Mary\u2019s names turned up on documents from four years after his death, in 1868, when a son, Thomas H. Turpin, signed papers at the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau, a federal agency that helped freed slaves.<\/span><\/p>\n Thomas Turpin\u2019s occupation was recorded as a painter and his complexion as light. The names of his mother and father, and those of eight brothers and sisters, living and dead, were also listed.<\/span><\/p>\n Raney said she identifies as African American, but it\u2019s a complicated history. A brave and loving white man is in the picture, as are his children, who could pass for white but have struck up relationships with women who look more like their dark-skinned mom.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI just feel like I always constantly have to explain myself to people who don\u2019t understand why I joined DAR,\u201d Raney said. She fingered pins on her chest that the DAR awarded for her service and the contributions of her ancestors.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI earned these,\u201d Raney said.<\/span><\/p>\n Twitter:\u00a0@bydarrylfears<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n