Ancestry

[CindysRain]

I love reading about my heritage.

My main ancestry is Cherokee - Irish, which I thought was odd, but apparently it was very common.

"From the 1770s, a strong connection existed between the Cherokees and the Scots-Irish. As waves of Scots-Irish settled on the frontier, they lived, traded, fought and married the Cherokee. Millions of North Americans have Cherokee heritage because many mixed-bloods “passed for white” or blended into African American families.

By the time of removal in 1838, the Cherokee had thoroughly adopted white ways. They became Christians, developed an alphabet, printed a newspaper, held slaves, lived in towns, owned farms, and discarded the clan system. This created records."

I hate how badly they treated my Cherokee ancestors, then called them the savages! And to make matters worse, converted them to christianity. Damn Irish should've left us alone!

I wonder how many Cherokee adopted "white ways" just to survive?!

Anyone else have any interesting facts about their ancestry?

[Dystopia]

Mine is a mix between the people who inhabited the Iberia Peninsula. Pretty much the tribes who were here before the Romans, the Romans themselves, the Visigoths, Arabs (a bit).

[c172]

I'm a mutt. My late biological father had a Swedish surname, my mother has a Germanic Swiss surname. Mine is a fusion of the two, thus American. There's a sprinkling of other stuff, too, like Spanish, Cherokee, and other things. My family isn't really into genealogy. I find it fascinating. I'd love to know what area of Sweden my folks were from. That country fascinates me.

[ignoramus]

Dad's pure Spartan.
During the rule of the Turks (ottoman empire) from 1421-1821, most of Greece was assimilated (hence near identical cuisine), but the areas near Sparta was so uninhabitable and sparcely inhabited anyway, the Turks never bothered with it.
This is why they say that only the Spartans are the only remaining "true" Greeks, as the rest of Greece has "Turkish" blood in it.
My surname literally means "victory over the Turks".

[Jenny A]

Half Swedish and half Danish--but my grandparents all met and married here so I'm second generation native born.

[CindysRain]

I know we traced our Cherokee bloodline pretty far back, to a young girl named CoonRod. And I've heard someone in the family has a pilgrim's hat. I have an aunt who has kept good records. I need to spend a day with her.

Everyone of your histories sounds interesting!

[popeyespappy]

I have an aunt who has kept good records. I need to spend a day with her.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff you should probably spend a lot more than a day with her. A couple of years ago my mom's youngest aunt died. She had been the last surviving family member from her generation. When she passed knowledge of people and events that no one else knew was lost forever.

As for me I have a good bit of that Cherokee-Irish on mom's side of the family. Her family comes from the Southeast Tennessee, Southwest North Carolina and Northern Georgia area that was and still is home to some of the Cherokee. Her mother was born in a dirt floored log cabin on Hanging Dog Creek outside of Murphey, NC. The other side of the creek was and still is part of the Qualla Cherokee lands. Another interesting bit of history about that piece of dirt is that one of the last battles east of the Mississippi River related to the civil war was fought there well after the Confederate States had surrendered.

On dad's side of the family on of my distant cousins spent many years researching our family. He traced our roots back to 13th century Germany, and published a couple of 1200 page plus genealogy books on the subject.

[The Grand Nudger]

Con-men and drifters....and you can't trust either when they tell you where they're from. I suppose if you really want to know where you're from you'd have to get sequenced (family histories and genealogies are notoriously unreliable). For example, there are a great many irish-cherokee, but probably just as many irish-african, and one of those things was acceptable whereas the other was not. So which story do we think that our forefathers preferred to tell themselves and others?

The Cherokee had an impetus for assimilation. The 5 Nations had been using them as a farming ground for a sort of prisoner taking luck building spiritual war - since they had tried to eschew conflict amongst each other - and conflict with europeans before, during, and especially after the beaver wars. Essentially, their pool of prospective captives had been reduced to minor tribes, minor, politically and militarily speaking. They needed conflict in order to maintain a system of honor and personal worth that was central to their culture. With no one to fight, no one can be "brave". Amusingly, killing the other guy was the least worthy thing you could do under their system. They saw it as fundamentally more cowardly and of lesser value. It's easy to ambush a guy in the woods and hit him in the head with a rock, it's not so easy to bring him back to your village bound and subdued, ready to be assimilated into your tribe to replace lost members or build a bigger base (thus building spiritual power). Anyone who's interested in this sort of stuff outta check it out, it's really fascinating. A captive could literally become a lost tribe member, taking his name and possessions - wife and children. They were actually auctioned off to grieving widows, fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons (the unwanted would be killed, generally). They were expected to fulfill the duties and obligations of the person whose place they had taken (or else they could end up like the unfortunate un-picked). I could rattle off about 40 racist anti-cherokee jokes off the top of my head, all of them coming to us from those noble savages, the native american tribes. My ex-wife could probably identify a few hundred coming from the Sioux alone (directed towards their neighbors). Point is, while we can fully accept that the fate of the native tribes was terrible, they weren't actually doing much differently to each other before or after we had arrived. They didn't need our laws or our religions to act shittily, and in an entirely recognizable manner. We had done largely the same when we (as europeans) were at their point of development. Had we not come along, the 5 Nations were already gearing up to oppress this continent and nothing would have stood in their way - save, perhaps, the western tribes - much as they stood in our way - for as long as they could.

My family is irish/?. Could be cherokee, could be "other". I'd be willing to bet it's both. I do loves me some fried chicken and big bootied women...

Given name was Mc'Cumail (before adoption). That much can be traced back to ellis and name shortnening common to the time period. Mc'Cumail becomes Mc'Call, Mc'Cool, Cole, Cool, Call - or just plain ole Mack. On my mothers side, we're the product of a man who had 8 wives in 3 states. He had a mule, a sack of bibles, and some salted pork, traveled up and down the appalachian mountains hawking everything but the mule, pretending to be a doctor, or, sometimes, a vet - but mostly a preacher. He couldn't actually recall (or didn't care to recount) who was who's when he inevitably packed up his brood and left momma behind - so the family tree stops being certain at that point on that end. Like I said..con-men and drifters...
(there's more irish blood in the us than there is in ireland..fractions at a time, lol)

[Tobie]

Half of my family comes from Lancashire (one branch of which I managed to trace back to 1272), some from Northern Ireland, some from the West Country. Most were farmers or masons, apart from the Lancastrian branch, who were once a prominent noble family (one was a doctor of theology at the Sarbonne, another was involved in a plot to kill Piers Gaveston, who was the lover of King Edward II) with a penchant for being executed (found 4 so far; two were catholic martyrs, one of whom had his head stored in a cupboard for around 200 years, another was a witch, and the fourth was a plain old murderess). According to my cousin, I am distantly related to Tony Blair.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Irish on both sides of the family. My maternal grandmother was a McPhee, she married a man called Jenkins, said she admired his cat. He got the cat from his brother's widow, her that was keeping illicit company with the local fishmonger. The fishmonger's wife was called 'Rosie' or 'Ruthie' (the records are a bit smudged), and she carried a glass eye in the pocket of her apron to frighten the local children with. She lost they eye in a game of All-Fours (dealer trumped on the jack and she didn't see it). The dealer was Seamus O'Donahue - not the O'Donahue who sank the ferryboat with the Protestant parson and the grey mare aboard (that was his brother Eamon). The parson eventually recovered (the mare was lost), and married an Englishwoman who owned a tattoo parlor and dildo emporium.

My father's father never amounted to much. He was once arrested and jailed for inserting citrus fruits into the recta of random sheep. One of the sheep belonged to 'Meekly' Harris, a man who once claimed to have set fire to a barbershop in Kingston, Jamaica. After paying the vet's bill to have two lemons and a tangerine removed from his sheep's lower intestine, Harris claimed it put him off lamb for life. Oddly enough, he developed a passion for citrus fruits. Harris was married to Enid Weatherwax, a local seamstress with a pathological fear of needles. She never made a lot of money at her trade. Enid's sister Miranda married Eamon O'Donahue of ferryboat fame (see above) but it didn't last. She eventually left him and took up with a man who had two wooden legs and no left ear. They have 17 children, all called 'Ferguson'.

Thank you for the opportunity to talk about my ancestors.

Boru