Ben Affleck’s Ancestor Did Not Own Slaves, Tax Documents Show

Georgia tax and census records show that Affleck’s great-great-great-grandfather likely owned no slaves at all—though he was the executor of estates that did.

None are safe from the Sony Hack, as Ben Affleck found out last week when leaked emails revealed his request to have a slave-owning ancestor edited out of the PBS program Finding Your Roots. Affleck came clean via Twitter, while the program’s producer and host, Henry Louis Gates, answered accusations of censorship by attributing the ommission to an entertainment-value editorial call: Other ancestors just had more interesting stories, Gates told Boston.com.

But new research conducted by The Daily Beast and Georgia genealogist Barbara Stock suggests that Benjamin L. Cole—Affleck’s great-great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side—was hardly the wealthy Southern plantation owner that Finding Your Roots claimed, and that the small-town Georgia sheriff may not have owned slaves at all.