Who Do You Think You Are?*

The triumph of love over barricades and differences: it's such a good story. Especially combined with the romance of the North American Frontier...

via GIPHY

But so rare. So rarely true.

I'm not the only one who thought that great-great-something gram was a Native American. I was told so, and the folks who told me believed it. Plus, in that one photo of her at umpteenty-seven, she was tiny, and dark, and those high cheekbones...

When researching, you start with an idea and look for the evidence; this is especially how it goes with family history. Because, as it turns out, EVERYTHING genealogical is hypothesis. 

​It's a wise child, after all, who knows its father.

In my version of the tale as old as time, my granny was not a princess exactly, but a woman from the Flathead tribe. 

Not for nothing, but does it not seem a LOT more truth-y to have Mashpee or Flathead than, say, Sioux or Cherokee heritage?  I mean, that's detail that makes the story real. 

But DNA doesn't lie.  And a paper trail (or the electronic ghost of paper), which would reveal the story as it happened at the time, also fails to show an indigenous connection among my forebears. 

That little old lady in the photo? I can trace her parentage three generations back and they all document as garden-variety English settlers who farmed that corner of Appalachia. Some lived in Cherokee, NC, so there's that, but alas, no Indian princess for me. ​

*Yes, this title is a shout-out to the genealogy shows (one in the UK, one here in the US) of the same name.