Part I

For my own tests I started in 2016.

First off was Ancestry. As I had done my genealogy research on there I figured it would be beneficial to have DNA data to match with the paper trail available in Ancestry.

Ancestry pulls much of its data in comparison to the gene pool of today. Meaning it takes DNA samples from around the world and matches it based on location, genetic markers, etc. giving the user a general idea of where their DNA matches in the world.

This is a little murky in that DNA changed in parts of the works due to the mixing of cultures and people resulting in more diverse peoples. So DNA markers change from year to year, decade to decade etc. You get the idea.

However, in Ancestries defense they are always updating their methods and means in which they track DNA and how it connect to the larger world. So this will continue to reveal more information for users new and old.

Here are the results:

As expected I’m mostly European.

The surprise was this Iberian peninsula, Eastern Europe, and Middle East. All of which I had no information on in the paper trail.

The other surprise was this little less than 1% Native American. Being that family had pushed the Native Princess narrative for so long I was surprised that it wasn’t more.

Then I dug deeper into the family tree and found a relative in the 1700s that was Ita Ha Ha (Barton Married Name) she married one of my white relatives Joab Barton, common for the time, but an exciting find none the less. She was Shawnee, born and living in Missouri in the 1700s. For that time, Missouri and the surrounding areas she lived such as Maryland, West Virginia etc. would have been something of a wild frontier, a borderland to much less familiar Western United States. This was a time before Lewis and Clarke, and the Louisiana Purchase. She passed away in Virginia in 1807, around 40 years of age.

Some records (maybe myths) indicate her marriage to a white man, Joab, was intwined with him being adopted into the Shawnee tribe after a conflict with his parents. I am not convinced that find grave.com is the best information for this type of thing. However, these incidents were common. Conflicts between settlers and native populations were not uncommon, and not unjustified. I might be pretty pissed if someone just waltzed in laying claim to my life too. However, a lot of people also died from diseases, injuries, and plain human violence among each other. Therefore, it’s not uncommon for native peoples to adopt orphan children, raising them, caring for them, nurturing them; the same that any of us would do.

The princess narrative came in as a way to inflate egos and ideas around white identity and intermarrying with native peoples. I’ll address this in a different blog.

When I took the 23andMe test around a year later the results were slightly different.

Part III