Remembering Melvinia

Seeing the first lady take her seat in the visitor's gallery of the House of Representatives for President Obama's State of the Union address was a reminder of the history of America and its people.

In 1850, presidents did not yet deliver their Constitutionally required message to Congress in person. And the Compromise of 1850, which was hammered out in the Capitol, gave America the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the most despised and controversial laws ever enacted.

And in that same year, 1850, a plantation owner in South Carolina wrote his will, and among his possessions he listed a 6-year-old girl known simply as Melvinia. She was a slave.

Melvinia would eventually live in freedom. And in the years after the Civil War, she would raise children.

We know something of Melvinia, who took the last name McGruder, thanks to research by a genealogist and researchers from the New York Times, which published an article about her family in 2009. When Melvinia died in 1938, in her 90s, her death certificate indicated that she may not have known the names of her parents.

Yet we all know one of Melvinia's descendants. And we saw her welcomed by members of Congress as she took her place of honor in the House gallery. Melvinia's great-great-great-granddaughter is Michelle Obama, the first lady of the United States.

Photograph: First Lady Michelle Obama at the State of the Union Address/Win McNamee/Getty Images