I have noticed what looks like a lot of smoke and mirrors in genealogies which people claim go back to a ancestor who was NDN.
Looking at the number of people reporting a family story of an Indian great grandma on their maternal line, and then looking at the number of mtDNA results in North America which show a indigenous mtDNA type, generally shows there is about 10 stories of a distant Native ancestor on the maternal line for every mtDNA result that actually confirms this. On the other hand, there is almost no one getting an mtDNA result showing a maternal line that is indigenous, when they always thought great granny was completely non native....
http://www.kerchner.com/cgi-kerchner/mtdna.cgihttp://www.mitosearch.org/haplosearch_start.asp?uid=You have to read through a lot to get the picture, as a lot of people are just reporting European results and family history, but if you do, the pattern that emerges is very clear.
The numbers show a lot more stories a gr gr grandma was an Indian than there was gr gr grandma's who actually have a maternal line that was Indian.And I would imagine a lot of people who had a story their great grandma was native who got a result which did not support this either did not report the story or did not report their test result.
Probably this is evidence that most family stories of NDN ancestry are not very reliable.
From what I've seen, there is a lot of inaccuarate genealogical information on line.
Genealogies which other people have put together can be helpful starting points, but if the conclusions they reach are important, all the facts they present and the conclusions they reach need to be checked out.
When I read a genealogy, I always wonder how the person who is making these claims knows this.
Reading this type of information I find it helpful to try and identify the essential facts which are the basis of the conclusion people reach , and I try and see if this fact is really a fact.
In genealogies, the basic relationships of people further back then grandparents is usually only accurately reconstructed through getting copies of old records like a birth record , marriage record, a death record, a will or deed. Assuming the history a person is reconstructing is based on facts, these records will be the backbone of the research and as a part of the research these records will be quoted and they will all have an exact date.
If people tell a story about what they claim happened, but there is no exact dates or sources for the records of the key events, and this involves a family history from more than 100 years ago , it is usually a big clue that even the basic facts the story is built on may not be facts at all.
If someone claims to have a record, or some historical information, which is important to proving their claim, but the source they give is so vague it is impossible to verify , they may be a sloppy researcher or they may be intentionally writing a work of fiction.
When people explain the location of a record , this information should contain whatever details another researcher needs to easily locate this.
Sometime people seem to try to gives a source which does not lead to a source, like for example , saying
"The record of this is in the Archives in Ohio"
or
"A French naval report for 1821 states"
They may as well say it is in a cardboard box somewhere in California.
When people know enough to want to seem to provide credible sounding sources, but manage to sidestep actually doing this, providing only enough information to give the appearence of credibility, I always get suspisious the author may be being intentionally decietful, and more research is needed before accepting their conclusions.
Another deception I have noticed in wannabe NDN genealogies, is that people claim their ancestor with a non native name was originally named something else but changed it without any explanation of how this is known.
In a proper genealogy , if a person has been recorded under two different names, these various records are quoted, the relationships which are proven by these different records are pointed out, along which the fact that the persons who are repeatedly described as having particular qualities or relationships with other people, appears to be the same person using 2 different names. And all of this should be accompanied by clearly described and accessible sources.
Another thing i've noticed which just seems crazy is when people assume that if a few people in a community are mixed blood and have a particular surname, then everyone with this same surname must also be mixed blood.
This is just silly. There is often many people who arrived on this continent with the same surname who aren't even related , and even those that are related have many different branches and lines of descent. If a non native family arrived on this continent and produced several sons with the same surname, and one of these sons or grandsons or great grandsons got partnered up with a Native women, the offspring of the other sons or grandsons or great grandsons will not inherit any Native blood through the wife of the one son who married her. I know this seems obvious, but for some reason people don't want to notice the obvious when it comes to American Indian genealogies.
If some people in an area with a particular surname are of native decent, it will create an important sense of context to find out how many people in the area have the same surname, and are of entirely non native descent.
I suspect these stories about distant relatives who married someone who was Native is the origin of the common story of an NDN grandma back there somewhere. I think often this was the story of an Uncle or cousin who married a Native , but over a few generations people gradually forgot the names and relationships to the person , and it became a story about " someone back there was an Indian".
In researching family history it's important to remember that people have first names, birth dates, brothers and sisters , parents , marriages, and dates of death and as it is very common for there to be 2 or more people in the same area with the same first and last name, all these details are important. Lots of families have a fondness for a particular set of first names and once there is a few generations living in the same area, there can be many people with the same name, and even the same general year of birth, who are not the same person.
The only way to be sure of the identity of a particular individual is to find several records left by their family that all fit together into the same picture.
Context is really important, so i think it's also important to learn about the general history of an area, and in mixed blood families I think it's important to learn both the native and non native versions of this..
I remember reading a genealogy where someone was claiming that because a family lived on a particular Island , and there was a native community there, it was evidence these people were native. This sounded like a reasonable conclusion, until I read that this island had been divided up into lots to distributed to many non native settlers a few years before the couple that was claimed to be Native moved there.
By learning the general history of an area it's easier to make sure all the details fit with what is being claimed and to avoid getting taken in by people who only select the parts of the history that support their calms to a Native identity that may not be real.
I've noticed it isn't that uncommon for some records to be flat out wrong, so finding more than one record which says the same thing seems like a good idea. I guess sometimes people lied or didn't know or the person writing everything down had had a long day and got confused.
The information which is wrong can usually be spotted when people use various sources, because mistakes and lies are usually inconsistent.
I think that learning how Native people in an area were identified, when they were identified, can give valuable clues about what to expect.
But I really don't think these occaisional mistakes and lies can be used to explain away not being able to find any documentation at all.
If someone has enough Native identity to be considered NDN, there will be records left by parents grandparents aunts and uncles, and if a family had a Native identity, even if some family members denied this or in some circumstances or times and places people didn't feel like saying this about themselves, it seems there should be at least a few records which identify the ancestors or direct maternal or paternal relatives as Indian over several generations.
