One of my great-aunts told me of a story about our Haitian roots, apparently there was a set of twins born to a black slave woman and a white Frenchman. During the revolution, the Creoles were given the option to side with black Haitians fighting the French—or they could leave with the French.
One difference between the Americans and the French as colonizers was that the French were more likely to acknowledge their black children, send them to be educated,
bequeath them money and property. So, the story goes, one of the twins stayed and fought with Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines for Haiti’s independence; the other one fled with their French father to the U.S.
I don’t know if there’s any way to track or prove it other than the DNA, but subsequent sets of identical twins have occasionally been born to members of our family.
