Yesterday’s News                                                Remembering Our Forgotten Past                                          April 2024

Great-Granddaughter DNA 

Daniel K. Oliver’s Great-Granddaughter’s DNA Test

The following DNA test has been provided as part of our effort of many years to debunk the earlier claim that Daniel Oliver was black. This claim was based on one piece of “evidence,” to wit, the letter M in the column for race in the census of 1880. This mark was clearly an error, either clerical or perception, by the census worker. At that time race and other ethnicity designation were entirely at the discretion of the census taker. There had been no other indication in the vital statistics or other data on Daniel K. Oliver or his family that they were of other than British or Northern European ancestry. A professor took it upon himself to begin announcing that our ancestor was black and for about 40 years the claim stood in academic writing and frequent newspaper stories. This claim was debunked by a newspaper article in 2015 after Daniel Oliver had been awarded a place among the Citizen Hall of Fame created by the Spokane Library Foundation. We provided this DNA at the time to prove our assertion that the earlier claim was false and without factual support.