Dr. Ben Carson’s Ancestry Reveal’s an Even More Interesting Backstory Than Carson Seems to Know

Family: Pictured in 2008, Carson poses in his home with his wife, Lacena 'Candy' Rustin, his two sons and his mother, Sonya Carson (seated at right) – who is actually legally named Johnnie.
Family: Pictured in 2008, Carson poses in his home with his wife, Lacena ‘Candy’ Rustin, his two sons and his mother, Sonya Carson (seated at right) – who is actually legally named Johnnie.

If you want to get your family history done, just become a front-runner for the Presidential nomination. Okay – that may not be easy to do, and it’s simpler to do it yourself. DailyMail.com (who hasn’t been supportive of Carson) has posted an extensive article about his family. I’m sure that their research wasn’t exhaustive or perfect, but it does reveal that while Carson may know a lot about brain surgery, he does not know a lot of the exacting details about his family. As all genealogists get to know rather quickly, the stories told around the dinner table are often found to contain a grain of truth – but that’s about it.

The following is a teaser from the article at the DailyMail website:

Ben Carson has made his mother’s extraordinary life story a central part of his campaign.

In his books, speeches and interviews, he has told how Sonya was one of a family of 24, married when she was just 13 and divorced his father after discovering he was a bigamist who had a second family.

But Daily Mail Online can reveal that little of that story is exactly as he has relayed it – although the truth appears to be just as inspirational as the version the Republican candidate has offered.

The differences between Carson’s version and what official documents and interviews with family members revealed suggest that the surgeon himself may not know the full story of his background.

Read the full article.

About Leland Meitzler

Leland K. Meitzler founded Heritage Quest in 1985, and has worked as Managing Editor of both Heritage Quest Magazine and The Genealogical Helper. He currently operates Family Roots Publishing Company (www.FamilyRootsPublishing.com), writes daily at GenealogyBlog.com, writes the weekly Genealogy Newsline, conducts the annual Salt Lake Christmas Tour to the Family History Library, and speaks nationally, having given over 2000 lectures since 1983.

One Reply to “Dr. Ben Carson’s Ancestry Reveal’s an Even More Interesting Backstory Than Carson Seems to Know”

  1. The research didn’t take into account several possibilities for the differences between Carson’s mother’s story and the evidence shown in the limited number of documents. For instance, there was no mention of children who may have been born and died between censuses, a common occurrence in that time period. For siblings who remember those children, they count, too.

    Nor did it take into account that his mother may have found her “husband” to be unfaithful, which she may have dramatized by saying he was a “bigamist”, and even the best of people can find themselves to be an alcoholic, which often leads to a large number of other indiscretions, and for someone who gets the help and works on their problems, to a devout religious life afterward.

    Also, if she had become sufficiently depressed to be hospitalized and considered suicide, there had to be underlying problems from her childhood that she wasn’t relating to her family members, which is disclosed in her statement that she married young because she had to get out of a problematic home situation.

    Parents often tell their children a version of their story that they think will be more acceptable, or is just easier to explain, and all children like to believe their parents would tell them only the true, and complete story.

    The culture from which this family came has also not been taken into sufficient consideration. This is a case of insufficient documentation and superficial reasoning. If you want an accurate picture, you need to do a lot more research than has been done by Daily Mail Online.

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