The Saponi/Tutelo, the Seneca/Cayuga and the Nanticoke/Lenape (Delaware)

In reading sources here like ‘The Other Blackfoot’ by Linda Carter, posts on Vance Hawkins’ blog, and ‘Senecas of the Sandusky’ by Stephen j Hartzell, I wonder to what extent these groups mixed. It’s a matter of record Saponi merged with Cayuga in the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations – Ontario)

There is a branch of my family separate from the one that led me to SaponiTown. There is no oral history of native background in this branch. Yet the places they lived put them in the ‘wilderness’ over multiple generations. Western PA in the 1750s, then the ‘Northwest Territory’ in 1799 in what would become Indiana, then Ohio. The first in the line was an early immigrant to PA from Germany named Druckenbrod who married an unknown woman.

Generations later they named one of their son’s Seneca. In my grandparents time the family would make regular trips from Indiana to the Finger Lakes in New York. The traditional land of the Seneca. Druckenbrod is not a common name, especially since my ancestors changed their name from Druckenbrod to Drybread. After a legal battle over land or money according to my family history. I almost never see these names, but was struck when I read a 1989 article ‘When the Pennsylvania Dutch Met the Indians’ that cited an expert named Richard Druckenbrod.

It seems to me that this family was living close or with Indian communities if not inter-marrying.

Linda’s article talks about the ‘Blackfoot of the Seneca” in WV in the 18th century. Vance talks about the Blackfoot referring to the Nanticoke/Lenape (Delaware). The article citing Richard Druckenbrod talks about a period of good relations between the Lenape and the PA Dutch (Germans who generally followed Quaker beliefs).

What I’m wondering is if the Blackfoot name could actually include all of these groups?