Debunking Candace Owens' Junk Genealogy
it's shocking, it's odd, it's... actually nothing of the sort currently
Since I've mentioned I'm a fan of genealogy I was asked to comment on some videos by Candace Owens where she pretends to dive into the family tree of VP Harris and I couldn't be more annoyed if I tried because this little foray took me into two categories I loathe - junkology and overt sensationalism.
To explain things, Candace Owens is trying to paint a picture that Harris' Paternal Grandmother, one Beryl Finnegan, is somehow not her grandmother. All of this is being done to question the validity of Harris black genealogy.
In Candace's "research" which appears to have consisted of no time at all on the free site FamilySearch, she's comes up with some "odd" things such as the idea that a women might have had two different jobs or careers in her life or that Beryl got re-married 4 years after the birth of her son Donald.
This is just insipid nonsense. That or Owens knows precisely fuckall about how people function in complex relationships.
A woman having a kid and then getting married to somebody else in almost half a decade isn't odd.
Neither is not being able to find records of any kind from any era. Records get lost or destroyed or you may just be looking in the wrong place.
So Owens finding it "very strange" that she can't find particular records, some dating back 80 years or more, shows a lack of understanding in this area of research.
When talking about records from half a century ago or more it's not uncommon at all for them to simply not exist here in America to speak nothing about how records may be kept, stored, or maintained in Jamaica.
Owens' mind would melt if she saw half of the truly odd things I've found in family trees over the years, even in recent generations.
Despite her bluster, the things that Candace Owens found, which took me all of 5 minutes on the free internet to check, don't paint the picture she's trying to sensationalize.
Most of Owen' conclusions are based around a death certificate purporting to belong to Beryl Finnegan except the only things on that certificate that match up are the first name Beryl and the parish of St. Ann in Jamaica.
That's it.
While Owens admits that the death date is wrong, she leaves out that so is the last name on the death certificate. While making a big to-do about how strange it is that she can't find records, she doesn't seem to find it odd at all that she offered up nothing to explain how Beryl Finnegan, who married a Newland, somehow died a Christie.
Candace couldn't even fact-check or explain her own evidence which was the only odd things about her videos. Again, it took me no time to find a Beryl Christie who had a child who died in 1943. I also found a Beryl in St. Ann who married an Eric Harris, son of Joseph Harris. Except that Beryl's surname was clark.
Beryl was not, by any means, an uncommon name in St. Ann at the time.
There's also a Beryl Finnegan who died in 1995 in St. Anne but based on her age on the death certificate she would have been born in 1914, which is the same number of years wrong as Candace's Beryl Christie and I can explain the last name of Finnegan because it's a maiden name whereas Candace did nothing to, again, explain away the wrong surname on her "evidence".
Do you follow me here?
Just because something is on the interest, and in this case it appears that somebody put what looks to be the wrong death certificate for Beryl onto FindaGrave, that doesn't mean that it's correct.
I know, I know, something being wrong on the internet is "very strange" but trust me it happens.
Obviously I can't conclusively prove that the photo of Harris and her grandmother is actually Beryl Finnegan but I've seen no credible evidence yet to dismiss it and no, wrapping common genealogy in phrases like "odd" and "very strange" don't count.
It took me 15 years to prove a man changed his name in the 1940s and I was only able to do it by finding a 90 year old receipt for a burial plot and by cross-checking city directories because apparently Jamaica kept better records than Arkansas at the turn of the last century.
Either Candace Owens and her team did less than an hour's worth of research - as that's all I did - or she's being deliberately dishonest to cash in on the outrage over questioning Harris' black card and she certainly offered very little by way of substantial facts.
I'm starting to think that the Daily Wire fired her because she's not capable of putting facts over feelings.
Cheers.