GOP Presidential Hopeful Parental Trivia

Virginia Sen. George Allen and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney are the sons of famous men (a great NFL coach and the governor of Michigan, respectively), but there is more to their parentage than that. According to Wikipedia, Sen. Allen's

mother, Henrietta Lumbroso, was a Jewish immigrant of Tunisian/Italian/French background... Allen's mother immigrated from French Tunisia, and was "Italian, French and a little Spanish" and according to Allen, was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. According to Allen's sister Jennifer, their mother "prided herself for being un-American. ... She was ashamed that she had given up her French citizenship to become a citizen of a country she deemed infantile."

Also, according to the ever reliable Wikipedia, Gov. Mitt Romney's father, a frontrunner in the early-going for the GOP Presidential nomination in 1968 and former head of American Motors, had an interesting family background:

Romney, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was born in an expatriate colony in the Mexican state of Chihuahua comprised of exiles from Utah who rejected the Mormon Church's decrees against polygamy. His family was forced to flee to the United States in 1912 because of the Mexican Revolution, lived for a time in Oakley, Idaho and finally ending up in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Time reported in 1959:

From his birth, Romney had little choice but to become a missionary of one kind or another. The grandson of a Mormon who sired 30 children by four wives, he was born into a monogamous family in Colonia Dublan, Mexico, where Mormons from the Southwest had settled 20 years earlier. When George was five, Pancho Villa drove the U.S.-born Mormons out of Mexico, and the family went to Los Angeles.

His Mexican birth has raised some questions about Romney’s constitutional qualifications for the presidency. Article Two of the Constitution specifies that only a “natural-born citizen” is eligible. Some legal authorities say that this means only those born on U.S. soil. But a law enacted by the first Congress in 1790 stipulated that children born of U.S. citizens beyond the boundaries of the country “shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the U.S.”

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer