re: Interesting historical pictures thread (add captions please)

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but she's not "mixed" - at least there's no evidence of such. Her parents were from New Jersey, with direct lines of descent from Europe. Of course, momma's baby is daddy's maybe without DNA evidence.

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Varina Banks Howell was born at Natchez, Mississippi, the daughter of William Burr Howell and Margaret Louisa Kempe. Her father was from a distinguished family in New Jersey: his father Richard Howell served several terms as Governor of New Jersey and died when William was a boy. His mother was a relative of Jonathan Edwards and Aaron Burr. William Burr Howell, who inherited little money, used family connections to become a clerk in the Bank of the United States. Howell relocated to Mississippi, the area for development of new cotton plantations. There he met and married Margaret Louisa Kempe (1806-1867), born in Prince William County, Virginia of a wealthy, planter family who moved to Mississippi before 1816.[1] Her parents were Colonel Joseph Kempe (sometimes spelled Kemp), a Scots-Irish immigrant from northern Ireland who became a planter and major landowner, and Margaret Graham, born in Prince William County. Margaret was illegitimate, as her parents, George Graham, a Scots immigrant, and Susanna McAllister of Virginia, never officially married.[2][3] (There were suggestions that McAllister may have been of mixed race; unfriendly residents of Richmond described her granddaughter Varina, when married to Jefferson Davis, as looking like a "mulatto" or "Indian squaw.")

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