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John Punch ( 1630s, living 1640) was an enslaved African who lived in the colony of Virginia. Thought to have been an indentured servant, Punch attempted to escape to Maryland and was sentenced in July 1640 by the Virginia Governor's Council to serve as a slave for the remainder of his life. Two European men who ran away with him received a lighter sentence of extended indentured servitude. For this reason, some historians consider John Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies," and his case as the "first legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake."[1] Some historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony, and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States. In July 2012, Ancestry.com published a paper suggesting that John Punch was a twelfth-generation grandfather of President Barack Obama on his mother's side, on the basis of historic and genealogical research and Y-DNA analysis. Punch's descendants were known by the Bunch or Bunche surname. Punch is also believed to be one of the paternal ancestors of the 20th-century American diplomat Ralph Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Evidence suggests that John Bunch, b. c. 1630-35, had an African father--African because of the mulatto status of his descendants, and father because John Bunch was free, the status of his mother. "Of the fewer than one hundred African men who resided in Virginia before 1640, John Punch is the only man who bears a surname similar to Bunch. John Punch was an adult male living in the period in which John Bunch I was born in Virginia, and resided in the same county." As the progenitor of the Virginia Bunch family, Punch was an ancestor of President Barack Obama.[1]
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