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"But my grandpa said he's Indian!" Adventures in Genealogy

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RedTailCoyote:
Working in a museum, I think if I had a penny for every time someone told me that their grandparent said they're NDN...we'd be able to build a new museum.  Though recently, I've been able to add Catawba, Apache, Creek, Shawnee, and Seminole princesses to the list.

And how you can see their high cheek bones, their longer second toe, shovel teeth, lack of body hair, deformed pallet, skin spots, and growths on their molars.

On a more personal note, when I started work for the museum it caused a HUGE commotion in the family.  We were taught that we were German on my father's side.  Come to find out Grandma is 1/2 Lithuanian and 1/2 something else that was never recorded.  Great Uncle is livid because he's "been trying to get them to register on the tribal rolls for years".  The rest of the family says...well...they don't say anything to me anymore because I just want to know.  The paperwork we do have says Tom and Mary Williams (Canada) No death date...no birth date...no territory.  Then their son born in Port de Luc (or deLucy, duLuc, duLuche, etc...) with no date (can't remember first name). Then he ran with his Lithuanian wife into Pennsylvania.  Where are the records?  Wait for it....town was said to burned down.  Where's the town?  Hell if I can find it!

My time trying to find any kind of information has given me a whole new appreciation for the frustration of all the NDN people who grew up in their traditions, mixed or not, with crazy people trying to claim elaborate heritage.

earthw7:
everyday I get someone who writes to me saying that they believe they have Native blood,
some people send me pictures or tell me they have an Indian nose, ears, eyes high cheek bones or whatever,
I do most of their background and find they are from Europe no matter what they think they look like,
Native people are very close family structures, if you dont know your family you are not native,
except in cases of adoption and fostered.
Just in the Lakota-Dakota-Nakota People, it is easy to look if you had a grandparent born before
1850 that has a white name "example" John Smith or Mary more than likely they are not Native,
The first white settler came on the plains in 1850s then it was not a friendly relationship.
The native people did not have first and last names they just had their names and when you
hear the name you can tell where they come from,

Coastrangechild:
My genealogy was hard to sort out. Mostly because my father is schizophrenic and made up all sorts of wild stories about our family, which I believed for a long time, and had to sort them out. No my Grandmother was NOT Annie Oakley, who actually was of a reptilian race from space. Eventually, my aunt traveled throughout the country finding records. And did some online and found some solid information.

According to her research we may have ties to a tribe in the NE - BUT even if it is true it is like my 21st grandmothers side ... and the records are spotty. So to "prove" anything is just a long shot. Really true or not it seems so very disconnected how could I, in good conscience claim to be "Native."

What is funny is that I actually do have high cheek bones and have been asked by MANY white people if I am Indian - which I always thought a very strange question. It is like asking somebody if they are Dutch because they grow tulips, but more ignorant. My aunt found a ton of pictures of our family from Sweden - and our face/cheek bones look VERY similar. In fact I found a picture of one relative from Finland in the 1800's who looks almost exactly like me. It was pretty awesome. So I do see myself in my ancestors but not in the way you are talking about.

And I experience a weird reaction from some when I say I am partially Scandinavian (I have dark features and hair). They generally say, "But you are too dark!"
I told one person it is suspected that I may have some Spanish ancestry, which is true but only a very small part ... they then went on to call me a derogatory term for somebody from Mexico.  People are just dumb. They want everything to be obvious and superficial. I blame it on Nascar. (((Just kidding)))

Defend the Sacred:
As the Powhatan "Emperors," "Princesses" and "Medicine People" have come up yet again in another thread, copying that post here, as well.

http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=4243.msg36268#msg36268

In various threads on here we've discussed the fabricated Powhatan ancestry issue. When I've referred to fabricated NDNs with fanciful English names, it was exactly this stuff:

"I am 16th Gr. Granddaughter of Elder White Feather and Scent Flower, Iroquois Leadership and Medicine People in 1600's "

What this means is she has white ancestors from the Jamestown colonies.

There are people on Ancestry.com who have merged what few Powhatans for whom we have documentation with any random NDN or suspected NDN they can find from within a hundred years and a thousand miles of where Matoaka et al lived. Those are two of those composite/fabricated people.

The normal NDNs, plus a community leader or two, who all got disrespectfully merged and misappropriated into non-Native's family trees, then turned into "Princesses," "Emperors," and now that it's more fashionable, "Medicine People," were in almost every case just some normal Native who happened to marry a white person. There is no reason to think they were medicine people, especially since they married white people and assimilated hundreds of years ago.

Other researchers and I have also encountered white people who find one woman with no recorded last name who start claiming that must mean she was an NDN. Real genealogists will be laughing your asses off right now, as we know that once you go back far enough, it's sadly the norm that many women never had their maiden names recorded. That's all about patrilineal naming conventions, and has zero to do with ethnicity.

Some of these histories involve white people who were slavers, and I think we should look very critically at claims that these young Native women *chose* to marry old white men. I think the real history for most of these women and girls was probably brutal, not romantic.

----------------------

The same person also claimed "druidic" heritage, because some "Mc" and "O" names turned up in her family trees.  :o

http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=4243.msg36269#msg36269

The Druids were the educated class of ancient Celtic cultures. "Celtic" is a language grouping, not a blood type, and people don't inherit cultural knowledge via distant ancestry.

earthw7:
I just had a call from a women in Ohio who claimed to be the granddaughter of Sitting Bull because her grandfather was the grandson of Sitting Bull, She was 72 years old so i ask how did they get to Ohio and what were they doing in Ohio? Then I asked how does she figure her grandfather was Sitting Bull's grandson. I remind her Sitting Bull died in 1890, with no living sons, at that as she said her grandfather was born in 1845 how could Sitting Bull have a grandson at the age 11 years old!
She told me now what I am going to do I told everyone all my life that I was related to Sitting Bull. I said its time to tell the truth.

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