Scuze me, but a spokesman for the Obama Campaign confirmed the accuracy of the report:
An Obama spokesman did not dispute the information and said that the senator's ancestors "are representative of America.".
"While a relative owned slaves, another fought for the Union in the Civil War," campaign spokesman Bill Burton said last night. "And it is a true measure of progress that the descendant of a slave owner would come to marry a student from Kenya and produce a son who would grow up to be a candidate for president of the United States.".
And to get there you had to go back six generations, a level that would comprise 64 people, while your own comparison is limited to "My Norwegian ancestors who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1880s", which is likely a total of two (or at maximum if they procreated with each other, four), besides which the 1880s would be at a more recent generational level anyway. For me it's at most three. Now I can keep going back and find my blood connection to Strom Thurmond, but I'd have to go waaaaaaay back. I wouldn't need to go as far to find slaveowners in Mississippi. But if I were to limit my comparison to the two people who comprise "my Irish ancestors who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1880s" and compare that with the complete geneaology of -- well, anybody, I could make the same claim. And it would be worth the same too.
Besides which, by the 1880s slavery was long since illegalized, so it would be impossible for any 1880s immigrants from anywhere, even Mississippi, to own slaves.
As I said, apples and lutefisk. Scrape... scrape... scrape...