Well, there goes my Native American ancestry! (Native Americans, white, blood)
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I was also told I have native ancestry from one of my maternal great grandmothers. I interviewed her about it when I was a teen and I have the tapes and she actually told me that her grandmother was native American. That this ancestor grew up in the southwest and when I asked what tribe she told me they were "Pueblo" and that she had been to their reservations
I got really into genealogy after interviewing her. I was 16 when I interviewed her. She died when I was 18. Since then (almost 20 years later) I really started digging into her family tree. I've discovered that the grandmother she spoke about was born in Ohio in 1859 lol. Also that this grandmother's parents (my 4th great grandparents) were from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania and none of our family ever lived in the SW USA. None of them have any papertrail linking them to being a native American at all lol.
I wish she was still alive so I could mess with her for lying to me when I was an intrigued teen. Luckily she did give me names and approximate death dates, a good story about her own life, neighborhood she grew up in, her siblings, and parents and her aunts/uncles, etc. Everything checked out with my paper trail except the NA stuff.
I think lots of Americans have this NA story in their family and I never believe it today unless there is some sort of proof of the matter.
Ironically the daughter of my great grandmother above - my maternal grandmother married a man - my grandfather who actually may have some NA ancestry based on the paper trail I've collected on his family. He is still alive and never knew that they were part NA.
I'm a west-coaster, but my dad was born and raised in Arkansas. It's funny because the story in my wife's family (which coincidentally also hails from Arkansas a couple of generations back) is similar--some unidentfied GGG grandmother was Cherokee. So yeah, it does seem like a popular notion. She hasn't done the DNA, so we don't know if it's true.
My DNA test also reveals a tiny amount of sub-Saharan African, so I wonder if the NA story was just a more palatable one than acknowledging that our heritage may include African? I'm thinking about what might be a "better story" to a bunch of Arkansans in the 1920s and 30s to explain a dark-skinned great grandfather?
My first thought, exactly.
Southerners of that generation would never admit to having black ancestors.
I'm in my early 50s and for all my life I was told my dad's side of the family had Cherokee dating back to my GGGG grandmother (early 1800s). It was family lore that was perpetuated by letters on old paper written in cursive about a full-blooded Cherokee woman who married a white pioneer in western North Carolina. The story goes that her tribe was angry and they kidnapped her and took her back. It always struck me that my GGG grandfather (who was, supposedly, 1/2 Cherokee) was always the dead-end in my genealogical research, but never gave it a ton of thought.
I did a 23andMe DNA test last year which showed 0.1% East Asian/Native American. I thought that was weird--I should be 1/64th, so shouldn't the proportion be more like 1.5%? But I took it as more or less confirmation that I was partly NA.
My mom just did her 23andMe test and we linked accounts. Linking accounts gave better resolution to my ancestry makeup and broke out the portion of my ancestry on both sides and lo and behold the 0.1% NA on my dad's side was gone. Vanished! I have no Native American ancestry!
As a youth I joined my high school's Native American club. I was always interested in my NA ancestry but my dad was totally fixated on it and tried several times to get my siblings and I registered and investigated benefits that we may be able to receive. It never came through though, probably because there was no proof of a link.
Now, 35 years later, I find out that I likely have NO Native American ancestry. I'm neither happy nor disappointed (hey, I am what I am!), it's more humorous to me that it was always such a big deal in our family only to find out it never was true!
Just thought I'd share that. What's next--that I'll find out that my immigrant grandfather really wasn't a Polish prince?
That's silly, and a bit strange, that your dad actually thought he could get you enrolled in the tribe, and that his motive was "for the benefits". If it was so important to him, he would have found out what the procedure and criteria actually were. Sometimes even people who have plenty of ancestry in the tribe, and may be 1/8 (the minimum is 1/16 for Cherokee) can't enroll because of the way the requirements work. So the whole story is fishy.
Anyway, it didn't work out in the end, so that's that. What part of the country was your paternal grandfather from, anyway?
Dad always thought he was 1/4 Cherokee and mom thought she was 1/8. I took the 23andMe test and it came back 1.9% NA/Asian and 1% Sub-Saharan African. 97% European. The DNALAND.com refinement of the test removed both of those and classified my as completely West Eurasian (European)... which is what the Geno 2.0 Project showed as well.
My dad's passed but my mom was rather surprised, but not disappointed. You are what you are after all. My sister was REALLY disappointed though. She'd always fancied herself to be Native American and had all the cheesy paintings and brick-a-brack around her house to celebrate it. She even finagled getting scholarships and access to Indian health clinics for her kids based on the family myth. She refuses to believe my results and so do her adult children. Its a little silly I think.
LW - The story of your dad investigating benefits suggests he didn't actually get far in his investigation - as someone before me said, you have to have a certain blood quantum to be allowed in, and 1/64 isn't even close. Also, many tribal benefits require that you can link your ancestry to the Dawes Rolls, meaning you'd have to have a name, not a vague assertion.
There are SO MANY people who claim some sort of Native American ancestry. And I don't think it's because it's more palatable than Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Rather, I think that it's "cool" to be Native American if you're actually white, because you get all the privileges of being white (none of the discrimination of being NA), while also getting to feel a little exotic.
Also, the government has pushed massive programs and campaigns to essentially "Kill the Indian and Save the Man" (an actual slogan used at one point). It's possible that, by so many white people insisting that they're Native American, it's a way of dissolving any argument that the land belongs to Native American tribes. After all, if even one of your ancestors, no matter how far back, was NA, then it means you can claim that you're not from immigrants.
Here's an article that was written specifically about why so many people claim Cherokee ancestry. The Cherokees actually have some of the best documented ancestral history, so if you can't document your ancestry, then you're almost certainly not Cherokee. It also suggests that so many people claimed to be Cherokee in the late 1800's as a way of proving that they were authentically Southern, and then their kids believed their stories, and so on. Johnny Cash claimed to be Cherokee (he wasn't), and we all know Elizabeth Warren claimed it as well (she's not). https://timeline.com/part-cherokee-e...67e#.46mbzpisa
My first thought, exactly.
Southerners of that generation would never admit to having black ancestors.
Honestly, I agree with this too.
I also think that black Americans (I'm black) claim the NA ancestry because they don't want the shame of being white in their family. May be odd to know by some whites but of all my older relatives that I interviewed, none of them liked white people very much, even one of my paternal grandmothers who was probably more white than black (her mother was a "quadroon" 3/4 white and her father was a extremely mixed race "mullatto" who looked like a white man with a tan - maybe Portugese).
My maternal great grandmother mentioned above who lied to me about NA ancestry, I believe may have also been part white. She had green eyes. Not too many green eyed NAs around that I am aware of lol.
"It was family lore that was perpetuated by letters on old paper written in cursive about a full-blooded Cherokee woman who married a white pioneer in western North Carolina. The story goes that her tribe was angry and they kidnapped her and took her back."
The tribe got angry and took that Cherokee woman right back. Trust me, Cherokee had a lot more to be angry at that time. Lotteries for land was more of a concern, within years Cherokee Nation would come falling down.
Do you know the power a Cherokee woman has in her tribe? In her clan? Cherokee are matriarchal and Cherokee ancestry used to be passed from the matriarchal line. If you are a Cherokee man and married a non-Cherokee, that child is not Cherokee. Cherokee tradition, when a mans (husbands) shoes are outside of the house, it means, "consider that a divorce." Woman owns everything and has power over family, she was considered the head of household. Not the man. Certainly this was before Cherokee became more Europeanized.
Apparently you never saw Cherokee rolls, as early as the 1817 Reservation Roll and Emigration Rolls. The last names should be evident, the Scottish and English surnames that permeate tribal members that "White" ancestry is in the Cherokee people from the male power. Cherokee were welcoming of Whites. However, they went after one Cherokee who married a White Pioneer.
In people or persons who cannot document these phantom ancestors sources are made to look more obscured or ambiguous. Can these things have happened? Sure, more before the Revolutionary War as far as the Cherokee are concerned. 1800's Cherokee we were considered among the "civilized" tribes and many, especially mixed-bloods owned plantations and slaves. Had farms, schools. For goodness sakes, Sequoyah in 1820 invented the Cherokee Syllabary.
"As a youth I joined my high school's Native American club. I was always interested in my NA ancestry but my dad was totally fixated on it and tried several times to get my siblings and I registered and investigated benefits that we may be able to receive. It never came through though, probably because there was no proof of a link."
I am in the least bit enamored by this statement. Probably? That is the reason. The "letters on old paper written in cursive about a full-blooded Cherokee woman" is not going to cut the mustard. You need to have that Cherokee ancestor on Cherokee federal rolls and show how you connect to them in your genealogy with birth certificates. That is what your father was missing. Proof of descent, be issued a CDIB card, tribal membership and that is evidence of Cherokee registry. To even claim it, at the very least.
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