George W. Bush’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Was a Slave Trader

[JDPriestly]

134. The word ancestor in the sense used in the article is defined as follows:

An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). Ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited."[1]

Two individuals have a genetic relationship if one is the ancestor of the other, or if they share a common ancestor. In evolutionary theory, species which share an evolutionary ancestor are said to be of common descent. However, this concept of ancestry does not apply to some bacteria and other organisms capable of horizontal gene transfer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestor

I don't doubt that Bush's ancestors may have been slave-traders. But that article is incorrect in claiming that Jefferson's ancestors were slave-traders based on the fact that his father-in-law traded slaves (although Jefferson's ancestors may have been slave-traders based on some other evidence).

I question the conclusions in the article based on the error regarding Jefferson's ancestry.