Just for the heck of it, I took a look inside Ms. McBride's book.

p. 10: "A third account of the [Gibson] family's origins has revealed an intriguing mixed racial background of a slaveholding family named Gibson who went from Virginia to mid-eighteenth century South Carolina seeking the available land grants. Governor Robert Johnson in 1731 described this family, headed by a carpenter named Gideon Gibson, as 'not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,' and he awarded them a land grant. The family soon achieved such status, the historian Winthrop D. Joredan has written, that by 1765 there was 'no evidence that Gibson himself was regarded by his neighbors as anything but white,' although he was probably a mulatto. There also seems to be no evidence in Mississippi records that the extensive Gibson family knew much more about their lineage than that the South Carolina Gibsons were 'stout Whigs & served in the Revolutionary Army" with "the Murphys...'"

I don't know how anybody else would read that, but it seems to me McBride doesn't discount the possibility of Tulane's version being true. But, then, I don't know why it would matter one way or another, either.

Penny