Harris' paternal grandmother died in 1995, when Harris was 31. An unrelated woman at the center of the claim died in 1960.
In late September 2024, conspiracy theorist Candace Owens asserted that she had made an incredible discovery: In her 2019 memoir, "The Truths We Hold," U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris published a photo of herself with "a Black-looking grandmother" despite the fact that her grandmother had died, Owens claimed, four years before Harris was born.
"How the hell does a person who is the vice president of the United States pass off a book claiming that these people … are her Black relatives and nobody bats an eyelash or does even a peripheral search to recognize that the woman that she put forth is implausibly her grandmother," Owens said in a YouTube video titled "Breaking News: Kamala Harris LIED About Her Black Grandparents."
This claim is demonstrably false. The evidence Owens used to suggest Harris' grandmother died in 1960 refers to a person born in a different year with a different last name.
Owens, in her coverage of this "scoop," flooded the zone with additional questions about Harris' grandmother, suggesting that documents prove she married a man who was not Harris' grandfather while noting a suspicious lack of documentation about the birth of Harris' father, Stanford economist Donald Harris.
Here, Snopes shows why Owens' claim that Kamala Harris couldn't have met her paternal grandmother is false, explains the origin of that misinformation and adds context to the pundit's innuendo suggesting Donald Harris' birth and or parentage is suspicious. Snopes has contacted Donald Harris, and we will update our article if he provides us with further information.
Harris' Grandmother, Beryl Magdaline Finegan, Died in 1995
In a series of YouTube videos, Owens located a document that likely records the 1917 birth of Kamala Harris' grandmother, recorded as "Beril" Magdaline Allen. This checks out, as it accurately records her mother as "Iris Finegan formerly Allen":
Though this document does not list any father, Jamaican marriage records indicate that Orah "Iris" Allen married Patrick A. Finegan in the same parish, St. Ann, in 1908, nine years earlier. Later records, including local newspaper articles, indicate that "Beryl Finegan," spelled with a Y, was the mother of the Donald Harris, who married Shyamala Gopalan in 1964:
In a 2018 essay, "Reflections of a Jamaican Father," Donald Harris wrote of the large influence both of his grandmothers had in his life. He referred to his mother, he wrote, as "Miss Beryl" and his maternal grandmother as "Miss Iris."
Both of my grandmothers had the strongest influence on my early upbringing (not to exclude, of course, the influence of my dear mother "Miss Beryl" and loving father "Maas Oscar").
[…]
Miss Iris, mother of eight children … was the sweetest and gentlest person one could meet, but underneath it was a tough farming woman who ran the cane farm at Thatch Walk (near Aenon Town) jointly owned with her husband "Mr Christie". Miss Iris died in 1981.
While all of the above evidence supports the notion that the birth record for Beril Magdalene Finegan is that of Kamala Harris' paternal grandmother, Owens pulled a rapid bait-and-switch to defend the claim that this same woman died in 1960. Here is the 1960 death certificate she cited:
In her YouTube video, Owens asserted, without evidence, that a woman named Beryl Christie is the same person as Harris' grandmother. The claim relies on the false notion that Beryl Finegan ever used the name Christie. Snopes has not identified any primary documents attesting to this fact.
Though open-source genealogy websites sometimes claim Christie was a name used by Harris' grandmother, this appears to stem from a misreading of Donald Harris' 2018 essay in which he described his grandmother's husband as "Mr. Christie," who owned a "cane farm at Thatch Walk (near Aenon Town)."
Around the time of Donald Harris' essay, people began editing open-source genealogy profiles of Beryl Finegan Harris to include an unknown and previously unrecorded "Christie" as a potential father. As a result, some erroneously appear to have concluded that Beryl would have gone, at some point in her life, with the surname Christie. This is not the case.
The Finegan name originated with Patrick A. Finegan, who Iris Allen married at age 19 in 1908. He died in 1928, when Iris Finegan would have been 39 or 40. It is entirely plausible that Iris Finegan married "Mr. Christie" after Finegan's death, making him Beryl Harris' stepfather. Christie did not lend his name or his genetics to Beryl Finegan or her descendants.
Some evidence suggests that "Mr. Christie" might refer to Carlton Christie. A 1977 newspaper article references a business owned by a man with that name located at Thatch Walk in Aenon Town, Jamaica — the location of the property referenced by Donald Harris — that had been caught up in a string of robberies.
A Find a Grave record for Carlton B. Christie does not include birth or death dates, but it does indicate a man with that name was buried in Aenon Town at St. Matthew's Anglican Church, the same church Donald Harris described attending in his essay. Regardless of who Mr. Christie was, however, there is no proof Beryl, his stepdaughter, took his name.
The Beryl Christie who died in 1960 was a real person demonstrably different from Beryl Finegan. Though also from St. Ann, she had a different birth date and last name, and her father died in 1946. She has been referenced in local news reports on
The Beryl Finegan who fathered Donald Harris, however, died in 1995 in the same town, Alexandria, she was born in. Her death certificate — which spells her last name as Finnegan — is a much closer match to the birth certificate of Beril Finegan than that of Beryl Christie, despite a discrepancy that suggests Finegan was either born in 1914, or was not, as recorded, 81 when she died:
"How did she meet Grandma Beryl almost 20 years after Grandma Beryl died, because Kamala Harris looks to be about 20 in that photo that she presented," Owens asked. The answer to this question is that Beryl Finegan was still very much alive.
The Beryl Christie who died in 1960 was a different person than Beryl Finegan. Because the latter Beryl died in 1995, there is no conflict between photographs that depict an adult Kamala Harris with Beryl Finegan and the historical record.
The Lawford Newland Claim
In an effort to poke holes in what she described as Harris' "narrative," Owens highlighted a 1944 marriage certificate between a woman named Beryl Finegan and a man named Lawford Newland.
Though this record would indicate a birth year of 1919 (which differs from either 1914 or 1917, the two years associated with Harris' grandmother), this Beryl was born in the right area and her father also was named Patrick Finegan.
"Beryl apparently was married more than once because Lawford Newland is not Donald Harris's father, but Beryl is his mother," Owens said in her video. "It says that she married a guy named Lawford Newland in 1944 when she was 25 years old. … That would have been four years after she gave birth to Donald Harris, Kamala's father. I find that to be very strange."
It is unclear what Owens found strange about this. If this record does indeed belong to the same Beryl Finegan who was Harris' grandmother, then it would merely indicate either that she conceived Donald Harris before her marriage to Newland, either in an earlier marriage or out of wedlock.
Donald Harris, in his essay, never described his father, Oscar Harris, as married to his mother. Of that part of his lineage, all he said was that "the Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural 'produce' exporter … who died in 1939 one year after I was born." Oscar Harris, Joseph Harris' son, is shown in one of the photos commonly shared by Harris and her family:
Note that this picture does not show Oscar Harris with Beryl Finegan, despite both being alive at this time. This supports the idea that the two were separated then.
Owens complained about a lack of documentation concerning Newland, the alleged second husband of Finegan. There are actually several documents about Newland that provide important background. We know, based on American immigration records, that a "Lawford Newlands" from St. Ann, Jamaica, was Black and traveled to the United States on multiple occasions. We also know his marriage to Finegan did not last.
According to a public notice published in the Kingston Gleaner, "Beryl Newland" and "Lawford Newland" were issued a divorce decree in 1957. This may be the reason the Harris family has little to say about Newland.
It bears mentioning that, while the chance for there to be two Beryl Finegans with fathers named Patrick Finegan in St. Ann Parish, Jamaica, in the 1940s may seem low, that is not necessarily the case. The Finegan surname, in general, and the name Patrick Finegan, specifically, are extremely common in St. Ann Parish. The name stems from an Irishman named Patrick Finegan — a plantation owner who owned land in that part of Jamaica and arrived there in the 1830s.
The Bottom Line
The Patrick Finegan who fathered Beryl Finegan is generally accepted to be Patrick Alhanasous Finegan, one of several mixed-race children of Patrick Finegan the immigrant. The Irish Echo described Harris' Irish connection in a 2020 story, citing genealogist Jim McNiff:
McNiff believes that Patrick A. Finegan, who married Orah Allen, aka Miss Iris, in 1908, was the mixed-race son of a man called Patrick Finegan from Ireland. Miss Iris and Patrick A. Finegan, were the parents of Donald Harris's mother Beryl.
Nothing presented by Owens challenges McNiff's above conclusion, Donald Harris' essay or Kamala Harris' book.
Owens' primary thesis, that Kamala Harris' grandmother died before she was born, is based on a death record that belongs to a different person. Owens' additional questions about the Harris "narrative" only look suspicious when combined with a feigned ignorance of the existence of divorce or birth out-of-wedlock.
For those reasons, claims that Harris "lied about her Black grandparents," in general, or that she staged a photograph with a Black woman who was not her grandmother, specifically, are false.