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In 2015, a number of social media posts and email forwards made their way to Snopes HQ: On 27 August 2015 a Facebook user shared the above-reproduced image, claiming that the mother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower was an orphaned mulatto woman named Ida Stover. Although the claim was novel to many social media users, questions about Eisenhower's racial background were not: for example, an 8 January 2004 New York Times article titled Surprises in the Family Tree examined why the topic of race and ancestry is sometimes complicated across American history: The article only briefly mentioned Eisenhower and Stover, in a manner that referenced the rumor without providing conclusive detail: According to that article, there were merely questions about Stover's racial ancestry (which had lingered for decades, seemingly without answer). Wikipedia also addresses the rumor on a page titled African-American heritage of United States presidents, where Eisenhower is listed under presidents with unverified claims of African ancestry, alongside Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge. The page is prefaced with a note that the claims originated primarily with amateur historians, were not verified by reliable sources in peer-reviewed publications, and that [m]ainline historians do not support these claims: The Times' 2004 article was published well before the candidacy of Barack Obama, but rumors of Eisenhower's purported African roots predictably surfaced alongside Obama's then-burgeoning campaign. A 5 February 2008 Pittsburgh-Post Gazette article emphasized that such claims were not considered credible by historians and geneologists: Another portion of that 2008 article noted that the claims should be simple to resolve, given recent advances in genetic mapping technology: The set of larger rumors (mentioning but not focusing on Eisenhower) were addressed again by NPR in a June 2008 segment titled Has America Already Had a Black President? which primarily explored the reasons behind (and not the credibility of) such rumors. The election of President Obama predictably reinvigorated the rumors, and a 5 November 2008 Emporia Gazette article described the claims as comprising mostly visual evidence (i.e., photographs of Ida Stover) and gaps in her family tree: Elsewhere on the internet, an undated page on the web site FrenchCreoles.com presented the same shallow reasoning: that Ida Stover visually appeared to be biracial, and her ancestry was not well-documented. Moreover, the site asserted that one family name (Link, which is not an uncommon surname) was common among both white and black families: A site called Rasta Livewire made similar, rumor-based assertions about Ida Stover's racial ancestry: While rumors about President Eisenhower's purportedly mixed-race maternal lineage became more popular during and after the election of President Obama, the claims remain unsupported and unsubtantiated. The primary sources for the claim were a 50-year-old self-published book and many decades of repetition, while substantive evidence for the assertion hinged largely on Ida Stover's 1885 wedding photograph (which many viewers believed hinted at a mixed racial lineage) as well as the concurrent existence of black and white families with the surname Link in her hometown during her youth. Neither source was a convincing evidentiary finding, and in the time since the rumors began, the advancement of DNA research has made it fairly easy to resolve such questions. To date, no one has conclusively proved President Eisenhower wasn't part black, but neither has anyone presented any clear evidence affirming he was.
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