Legends

[rmstevens2]

When I was a little boy I was told the family legend from my mother's side. The legend was that my maternal grandmother's mother was "Indian" or "Half Indian" (meaning Amerindian or "Native American"). I accepted it because that's what the grown-ups said (my dad was characteristically quiet about it).

Now, as a result of quite a bit of DNA testing, I can say at last that the family legend is not at all likely to be true. Not only is there no trace of Amerindian autosomal DNA in me, there is none in my mother either, and our mtDNA haplogroup is the very European U5a2c3a. I was a little let down. Amerindian ancestry would have been cool, but it was just a neat story and nothing more.

I think it stemmed from the fact that my maternal great grandmother had long, very dark hair and high cheek bones. However, her eyes were pretty obviously light blue, which is apparent even in this black-and-white photo. That's my maternal grandmother on her mother's lap.



Anyone else got a family legend that was either proven or disproven by DNA testing?

[Running4Borders]

Same kind of deal on my end here. One of my grandmas was told growing up that she was part Cherokee but I'm not seeing much evidence that was the case. Think I remember at one point Indian ancestry being offered as an explanation for why she was nimble into old age. In her 80s she rode around on a Razor scooter with my brothers and me. Pretty classic Cherokee thing to do.

The other (semi-)legend I can think of: One of my great grandpas was a Hume and the understanding is that he's from the same Hume line as David Hume. Not a direct descendant, David Hume didn't have any kids, but my ggggg(etc) grandpa was the same person as his g(etc) grandpa. It's become a fun sort of genealogical puzzle though because my mom and I don't have any cousin matches over on Ancestry to any Humes besides ones directly connected to my great grandpa. We do have strong DNA ties to a family that some of the Humes in upstate NY were attached to making me think the paper trail we've followed is sorted, both of us have robust thruline ties to that family. Still haven't solved that puzzle, possible there was a non-paternity case or adoption somewhere in there, but there are plenty of other explanations.

[rmstevens2]

I grew up with the Amerindian legend of my mother's family. I always wondered to what tribe my maternal great grandmother belonged.

Well, that's all over now. Kind of sad, but the truth is the truth.

[Jalisciense]

My maternal grandma had told me that her dad was a Spaniard (But as far I have researched, it seem to be not true).

Still, when I look at his photos he looks Spaniard (And my Iberian friends are agree). So probably it'd be the reason my grandma though he was Spaniard.

Anyway, I'll keep looking for more info about it. If I find some, I'd post it here.

PS: We all get Iberian components in the DNA tests and my grandma didn't receive good matches, so in our case it wasn't very helpful to see if it was true about my Great Grandpa xd

[Webb]

When I was a little boy I was told the family legend from my mother's side. The legend was that my maternal grandmother's mother was "Indian" or "Half Indian" (meaning Amerindian or "Native American"). I accepted it because that's what the grown-ups said (my dad was characteristically quiet about it).

Now, as a result of quite a bit of DNA testing, I can say at last that the family legend is not at all likely to be true. Not only is there no trace of Amerindian autosomal DNA in me, there is none in my mother either, and our mtDNA haplogroup is the very European U5a2c3a. I was a little let down. Amerindian ancestry would have been cool, but it was just a neat story and nothing more.

I think it stemmed from the fact that my maternal great grandmother had long, very dark hair and high cheek bones. However, her eyes were pretty obviously light blue, which is apparent even in this black-and-white photo. That's my maternal grandmother on her mother's lap.



Anyone else got a family legend that was either proven or disproven by DNA testing?

I have a similar story.  My great, great, great, great grandmother, Matilda L. Lindel Nickell was supposedly Native American, and the story is that on her death bed, she told a granddaughter that she was Native American, but had pretended not to be, so as to avoid being moved out West.  She was born in Kentucky, and the story even goes that she was Kentuck Indian, which supposedly was a very small tribe that got absorbed by the Cherokee Nation.  I have never found any mention of a Kentuck tribe.  Anyway, I always doubted the story, particularly since I didn't have any trace of Native American when I tested at FTDNA and Ancestry DNA, but being so far removed from her, genetically, I thought there could always be a small chance.  Then when I was building my tree, I found a death certificate for her son, where the informant, his wife, listed his mother as Tylda Lyndhall, born in Germany.  So right away, I knew the story wasn't true.  Then my dad's Aunt, who would be her great granddaughter, tested at Ancestry and she didn't have any Native component at all.  The story is so believed, that many people do not list Matilda's parents on their tree, which is easily documented as Lawrence Lindle and Elizabeth Featherkile.  Both are listed as being born in Kentucky, but Featherkile is most definitely an Anglicization of a German surname.  Lindle probably as well, and could be German or Dutch.  You can find a picture of her easily on a Google search.

[Pylsteen]

One interesting story that my gg-grandmother (from the Dutch East Indies) always told was that her maternal grandmother was born on a pirate ship and was later brought to a French monastery. Later, we found that my own grandmother was about 4% "South Asian" and has a South Asian mt-dna line (below M3), which was from this line. Later, I found the birth certificate of the elusive grandmother of my gg-grandmother and of her brother in a Family Search center: indeed, she was born on a ship, but not a pirate ship; her father was a British Indian captain (half English, half "mixed Dutch/Indian"), travelling between British and Dutch East Indies; and her mother, indeed, a Native British Indian woman from the east coast of India. Along this sea route, the child was born. 23andMe still gives me 1.5% South Asian. But what about the "French monastery"? I don't believe it; her father was Anglican or Dutch Reformed. He settled in the Dutch East Indies, married to a new lady, and left his former Hindu wife in the native village, which was the custom during the early 19th century. I wonder which language she spoke, because most of the inhabitants likely spoke Malay. The story about the monastery may have been made up to hide their non-European background; my gg-grandmother denied having Asian ancestry, even though she grew up with her grandmother, who was quite mixed seeing her photograph and though her own husband was about three-quarters Indonesian.

[JonikW]

My paternal grandmother, born in 1911 and who was half Welsh, always claimed that her great grandfather on her English side was an illegitimate son of the Earl of Ilchester. From memory this ancestor would have been born in the 1820s. I have no way of accurately assessing that claim of a noble line although I have found proof that my ancestor was a poor Dorset fisherman, which obviously makes it unlikely to say the least.

The interesting thing is that I have an American match on Ancestry on that same line. We've been in touch. Their own family story is that our ancestor was the illegitimate son of George IV. I think my grandmother's story is the original one because the Ilchester line was local and my grandmother was an accurate preserver of family lore. I never knew any of her many accounts to vary over the decades she was with us. Genealogy was a passion for her and she passed on all the hard work she'd done on our Breconshire side to me (as well as a love of the subject). Her work was all done by actually visiting the places concerned in those pre-internet days.

I failed to convince my distant American cousins that they'd received a garbled version of an already highly unlikely story. George IV even features on their tree on Ancestry.

[Cejo]

Not precisely DNA related, but...

A big legend in my family was that our ancestors were involved with the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania, and that they had to change their names and go on the lam, which made it impossible to trace our roots past a certain point. My grandfather thought they might have went by Lally, or maybe Lackin. Or maybe our surname wasn't really Larkin to begin with, and they made that up.

It took a while, but I managed to find the paper trail to prove that this did in fact happen. Patrick Larkin and Bridget Lally (their real names) left from eastern Galway before the Famine, and came to the anthracite region of PA, where they toiled away as coal miners, which tells you how bad thing must have gotten in Ireland by that point, if that was a step up. Census records were consistent until 1870, at which point they moved and provided fake names, ages, and relationships (the fake surname was Lackie, not Lackin), then they reappeared in 1880. That gap was the period when the labor movement was most heated, and Molly Maguirism was active in that part of Pennsylvania. 

Of course, I had to work backwards, so I feel fortunate to have had the tools available to me which allowed me to search through so many records, so that I could finally push through that blocker. I was able to not only confirm that the family legend was probably true (why else lie to census-takers?), but also to extend our paper trail back to Ireland. Since then, DNA has revealed some of who my ancestors may have been in the more distant past, for which I am also extremely grateful.

This was the actual state of our family records when I took over the job:


  michael_little_known_notes.jpg (Size: 31.31 KB / Downloads: 208)

[Rufus191]

One interesting story that my gg-grandmother (from the Dutch East Indies) always told was that her maternal grandmother was born on a pirate ship and was later brought to a French monastery. Later, we found that my own grandmother was about 4% "South Asian" and has a South Asian mt-dna line (below M3), which was from this line. Later, I found the birth certificate of the elusive grandmother of my gg-grandmother and of her brother in a Family Search center: indeed, she was born on a ship, but not a pirate ship; her father was a British Indian captain (half English, half "mixed Dutch/Indian"), travelling between British and Dutch East Indies; and her mother, indeed, a Native British Indian woman from the east coast of India. Along this sea route, the child was born. 23andMe still gives me 1.5% South Asian. But what about the "French monastery"? I don't believe it; her father was Anglican or Dutch Reformed. He settled in the Dutch East Indies, married to a new lady, and left his former Hindu wife in the native village, which was the custom during the early 19th century. I wonder which language she spoke, because most of the inhabitants likely spoke Malay. The story about the monastery may have been made up to hide their non-European background; my gg-grandmother denied having Asian ancestry, even though she grew up with her grandmother, who was quite mixed seeing her photograph and though her own husband was about three-quarters Indonesian.

Very interesting story, thanks for this. I think so many Europeans, or anyone who would be considered 'white' were so nervous of people discovering that they had non European ancestry, so many different imaginative stories were made up to explain things or to distract in some way. A famous example, is Anna Leonowens, who was the inspiration for the governess in the King and I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Leonowens
She made up a total fiction of being born in small Welsh seaside town, when she was in fact born in British India of mixed origins. Her nephew was the actor Boris Karloff, who I think you can see some clear Indian ancestry in his appearance even though the amount of DNA he had must have been fairly small
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff

Regarding the OP's original posting about native american ancestry, this seems to be such a common thing in the US. Some people have theorized it was a way of assuaging guilt for the native americans loss of lands and life etc. to the incoming European settlers. But perhaps sometimes it could simply be someone had a little darker look but it simply due to normal European variation. Apparently in Quebec it is very common to have a small amount of native american ancestry, due to the fact originally so few European women came, just European men who worked as fur trappers etc., and they tended to take native wives. It wasn't simply about the basic human urges, it was survival as native women had better knowledge and skills to survive in the wild areas of North America.

[rmstevens2]

I think "guilt" about Native American losses is a relatively new phenomenon.

[Pylsteen]

Very interesting story, thanks for this. I think so many Europeans, or anyone who would be considered 'white' were so nervous of people discovering that they had non European ancestry, so many different imaginative stories were made up to explain things or to distract in some way. 

What certainly also played a role was the social structure of the Dutch colonial society: you had those of European status (full-blood Europeans, mixed European-Asians, some full-blood Asians naturalized to European status) and those of native, Indonesian status, (not counting the various other communities present such as the Chinese), both with their own law system. When you grow up in such a system, your legal status overrules your biological background, although obviously race did play a role: the governor-general was preferably Dutch-born. The mixed European-Asian community was, although often bilingual in Dutch and Malay and surrounded by Indonesian food and cultural elements, generally European-oriented, christian etc. When after WW2 many of them came to the Netherlands, it was a bit of a shock that they, feeling proudly European and being so by law, were often regarded as foreigners.

[member]

Yes, not a legend, but by doing DNA test I figured out my Slavic heritage is actually very small. I'm mostly of paleo-Balkan origin, which I expected to be in opposite proportions, although my Y-DNA haplogroup is probably of Slavic origin, so I now kind of wonder what happened there.

[rmstevens2]

Yes, not a legend, but by doing DNA test I figured out my Slavic heritage is actually very small. I'm mostly of paleo-Balkan origin, which I expected to be in opposite proportions, although my Y-DNA haplogroup is probably of Slavic origin, so I now kind of wonder what happened there.

I have something a little bit similar. My Y-DNA line is Welsh, but I am only 11% Welsh at Ancestry. I am 51% Scottish, and 28% England and NW Europe. There are a lot of Scottish surnames in my pedigree that all came in via females. The remaining 10% comes from Norway, Denmark, and Finland.

[member]

Yes, not a legend, but by doing DNA test I figured out my Slavic heritage is actually very small. I'm mostly of paleo-Balkan origin, which I expected to be in opposite proportions, although my Y-DNA haplogroup is probably of Slavic origin, so I now kind of wonder what happened there.

I have something a little bit similar. My Y-DNA line is Welsh, but I am only 11% Welsh at Ancestry. I am 51% Scottish, and 28% England and NW Europe. There are a lot of Scottish surnames in my pedigree that all came in via females. The remaining 10% comes from Norway, Denmark, and Finland.

Your case is cool though. If I were you I'd consider Welsh and Scottish nations of the same cultural group (both Celtic) so that would be fine. I don't know how pre-English languages were different, but for a long time they all use English so that's fine as well. Besides, I don't know how can they figure out the difference between Welsh and Scots? Probably some insignificant difference.

In my case FTDNA assigned me just 1% West Slavic, 79% Balkan, and the rest mostly different countries from central/western Europe (Iberia 7%, Hungary 6%, Central Europe 4%, Scandinavia 3%). So, compared to my heritage its pretty foreign DNA. Kind of annoying.

[Kellebel]

Our family myth was that my mom descended from Spaniards somewhere down the line. Surprise, surprise: we do have some Southern European ancestry, but most definitely not Spanish.

Ngl, I was kinda disappointed. Don't get me wrong: no matter "what" I am, I'm still me and proud of who I am. But when you've been told your whole life that you come from a certain place and people and it ends up to be anything but true, it takes some time to adapt to that idea.