Can't Deny Your DNA!

The summer is, for me, over, at least the part that lets me jump up and run off whenever and wherever I choose. School’s back in session, and I am back to enseñando el español. I love “my babies,” but my time is much more limited now.

At any rate, on the way to work one morning last week, I started thinking about that new thing some of us have done: the DNA test.

I confess I haven’t had one. I haven’t done the spit just yet. There was a time when, in my own family, I was absolutely certain (as were many of my first cousins) that we were descended from a Cherokee woman named Maggie Petty. Last year I mentioned in another post (https://allthingsalawine.blogspot.com/2017/12/sweet-mysteries-of-life.html) that at least three cousins—all descended from Maggie—have taken DNA tests that show no Native American blood in them. By extension, this would mean, in me as well, of course…at least, not through Maggie. That wouldn’t exclude it from other ancestors, but except for one possibility on my mother’s side, I don’t think it’s there.
One of my first cousins on the Alawine side was very surprised about this and asked me how the stories started, how they were extended through the generations, and I don’t have a firm answer for that, only some theories and things I've read. My own father believed his great-grandmother Maggie was Cherokee. I never thought to ask him how this had been passed down, and of course he and all his siblings are gone.

So, how DO these things begin? Well, I think they’re products of a type of 20th-century idealism that’s been around before at different times in history. In the early 1800’s people up North who discovered mounds, relics of Indian culture, and so on, couldn’t reconcile those things with their own opinion of Native Americans as “savages.” The settlers had wrested land from the Indians; earlier, the explorers of the 1500’s had passed on diseases and had decimated some of the Native settlements, leaving desolate remnants of the original populations. By the 1800’s people in the East wondered how these smaller bands of Indians could possibly have created the mounds and the pottery and the cities they found traces of all over the place. Since their current experience with the Natives didn’t indicate the original extent of their civilization, they assumed there must have been a “different” group in earlier centuries that built the mounds and produced the relics, a group of more “noble” Native people that were no longer around. [For a really interesting take on this phenomenon, read Fawn Brodie's 1945 book.]

Settlers just couldn’t reconcile that evidence of a powerful earlier civilization with what they were seeing by that time. And perhaps in the early 1800’s they just didn’t understand how the explorations and first contacts in the late 1400’s and early 1500’s had changed everything.

But why did so many people in the 20th century wistfully want to claim Indian ancestry? I think it goes back to that similar movement in the 1800’s. People wanted to believe they were unique in some way. In the South we are largely from German, Irish-Scottish or English stock. But those dark eyes, that black-brown hair—surely that was different, surely that had to mean Native American blood! No, actually, there are many, many non-Native people with those characteristics.

And another thing to consider is that, no matter what we want to believe now, most of our ancestors were grasping people, in the sense that they took whatever they could from the places they settled…even if that meant displacing groups who’d been there on the land, first. As a studier of human nature, I’ve always found that when you know, inside, that you’re mistreating someone, your conscience tries to make you think it’s their fault, not yours: they brought it on themselves. Human beings have always been good at this kind of thing.

So if our ancestors believed (as most did) that they were justified in taking Native Americans’ land because of their own superiority—and, remember, by the 1800’s, Southerners in most places weren’t seeing many Indians, anyway, and certainly not after the 1830’s when they were shipped out West—why would they have socialized with the Natives to the degree that they’d consider marrying them and having children with them?

The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t have.

My own ancestors were Indian-fighters; I’ve got copies of their service records in various wars and skirmishes. It just doesn’t make any sense that they’d intermarry with people they were trying to drive away. The same is true of the Thead line (and associated branches).

And that’s where I’ve ended up concerning Native American ancestry in the Theads, Harmons, and so on.

In my last post (https://theadsnotthreads.blogspot.com/2018/07/nation-of-immigrants.html) I more or less discussed all this. As it happens, at least one Thead cousin descended from James Denton Thead (who was a grandchild of Alexander Thead, one of the two brothers who were in Southern Alabama near the Choctaw Trading Post in the 1830’s) has had a DNA. I recently asked her if she’d mind sharing the results with me, because if James Denton was 1/8 Indian, it should still show up to SOME extent in this cousin’s genes. I’m giving her anonymity, but here’s her report:

I see the same thing over and over in my own family. And perhaps those of us who are so shocked that our long-cherished hope of having Native American blood has been dashed should do a reality check along the lines of what I wrote above: Our ancestors from the 1800’s did NOT have the same view of the Native population as most of us do today. It may be that we’re just projecting our wishes upon them.

And yet…

Why are these three Thead relatives buried in a Poarch cemetery in Southern Alabama? (The Poarch are a Native American tribe in that area.)

From Findagrave.com

If anyone has an answer, please put it in the “Comments” below.

On the Harmon side of my daughters’ Thead line, there’s another of those puzzles that could easily drive me crazy if I let it. A family member—one of their second cousins—said over the years that she knew that her Harmon ancestor, a couple of generations back, was Native American. (This particular relative was descended from Francis “Fannie” Harmon, who married Will Mixon.) I tried to trace this line back, and, as so often happens, hit a blank wall pretty fast.

Here’s what I have on that side, minus the ancestry of Mary Irene Wilson (I’ll cover that in another post):

It seems pretty straightforward going backwards from Benjamin Franklin Harmon, who was the father of “Pinkey” Harmon and nine other children. Benjamin was the one supposedly part Native American. I easily found him in the census:

1880 Kemper MS

But wait! Look closely at where his family relationship is listed: “Adopted,” along with his sister Francis—the one who married Will Mixon, later. (She's shown as "S. C." or "S. F.") Now, in my research experience, family relationships were recorded pretty accurately during that period of time. If you were a grandchild, a niece, a cousin, that was written down. Right above B.F.’s and Francis’ names is Dorset, and he’s clearly listed as “son.”

So this means that B.F. and Francis may have been orphans who were living with another family. Since their last name was Harmon, perhaps they were related to Robert and Martha. —Or perhaps NOT! In other censuses children living with their mother and a stepfather are sometimes shown as having the stepfather’s last name, instead of their actual father’s. So it’s possible that Benjamin Franklin and Francis may not have actually been named “Harmon” at all.

And they’re shown as Caucasian. That in itself may not mean much, as not everybody from that time gave their race as Indian for the census. But whether they were or weren’t, I can’t prove or disprove it, because of that “Adopted” status. Who knows who their parents were?

So I was inclined to pay attention to the descendant’s story about her Native American blood—until one of HER descendants recently had a DNA test that points to a predominantly Irish background and (again) NO Indian blood! (Once more, I’m not naming the relative, to preserve her privacy.)

So there we are. People who don’t like giving up cherished notions sometimes scoff when I mention DNA. They say, “Well, that’s not always proof.” We all like to believe the legends, because they’re just more interesting than facts, sometimes. But, yes, DNA generally is proof. And, I mean, I’d love to be able to claim Native American kinship, but I can’t find any yet in my own background, and I’m fast arriving at the conclusion there won’t be any. That is sad, but I’m willing to accept it as fact.

Ælfwine