John Henry Clay (abt. 1824 - 1909)

It's controversial, just as Thomas Jefferson's parentage of children he enslaved was once controversial but has now been widely accepted. I added some notes explaining that John Henry Clay's descendants were told he was the son of Henry Clay, so it was known among the family. I've been told that John Henry Clay was with his half-brother Henry Clay Jr. when he was killed at the Battle of Buena Vista and helped remove his body from the battlefield, but I can't find a solid source for that, although the body was indeed recovered by his slaves serving with the regiment.

Do we know if DNA has been helpful in determining this?

In the Notes section I posted a link to the Flickr album that's collected the evidence, including DNA evidence. It seems to me that the matching segments are too small to prove anything definitively. But the connection is distant so the small segment sizes are to be expected.

I think that the way Ali's aunt talked about the family connection to Clay is compelling. It was considered embarrassing in her grandfather's time (with him being teased and getting into fights over it) and even at the time she was interviewed (in 1980) she's trying to shake off the stigma of it, saying "those things happened back then, it's nothing to hide." It all seems very plausibly true. But of course even John Henry may have been mistaken about his father's identity; only DNA could prove it. I hope the DNA evidence is one day substantial enough to prove it one way or the other.

Hi J,

I was unfamiliar with this possibility also. I've found some good sites (no, there aren't any primary resources of which I am aware) that shed light on this possibility. See the Phoebe Moore biography on the official Ashland--The Henry Clay Estate website, at https://henryclay.org/biographies/

Lol! This is happening a lot. The DNA can tell us a lot. About half of the people who are listed as my 3rd-8th cousins on my DNA report are Euro-American. So, all the Clays have to do is determine if any of them are related to Henry Clay? They can figure that out through looking at the charts of their Euro-American Clay DNA relatives?

See, I am related to two of the Africans who were paraded through the Jamestown Colony as well as to Richard Warren, Rev. John Lathrop, Robert "King" Carter, etc. Each of those men were prominent. Those relationships in turn make me related to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, George Bush, etc. I'm related to Sir Francis Bacon, because the slave woman, Lucy Bacon, was the daughter of George Langston Bacon, 1798, VA. What if from the DNA I cannot tell if it was him or his brother? Does it really matter? The Fitzgeralds on my chart were related to JFK. Yes! They are on my chart because my DNA relatives led me there. Little did we know that he had slave owning relatives and was likely closer to Ella Fitzgerald than the pictures of them showed. (Someone likely knew it.)

My chart reads like who's who. There is a slave owning family on every branch of my tree. Every last one! Many were related to prominent families. Prominent southern families owned slaves. I was not expecting to find any prominent families on my chart, but let's face it, those families were better able to own slaves than poor ones were? Also, when your roots go back into the early 1600s and slave women were routinely raped, since they were owned as personal property, and since slaves were given as part of dowries, African Americans are going to be related to many prominent Euro-American families. And those families cannot be skipped when doing genealogy, because if they are DNA relatives, then they are and because the only time slaves tended to be mentioned by name were in the diaries and the probate records of the slave owning families. While people lie, DNA doesn't. The law in the southern colonies and in the southern states was partus sequitur ventrem. Meaning: That which follows the womb.

I'm now following the DNA, largely through tracing the DNA families.

The Thomas Jefferson confusion was resolved using Ydna. A Clay male who is a descendant of Henry Clay can test Ydna at FTDNA and that can be compared to a Clay male descendant of John Henry Clay. The results will be accurate as Ydna is stable over many generations. It has to be a Clay male on both lines.

Thanks Brenda. Well said. Impeccable logic. Gets to the heart of the matter.