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Dear Quest,
Good news on the Nottoway and your paperwork!
So glad to hear it!
I wish for such good news for everyone here…sooner or later. I also wish for a brand new day for those of Indian descent. We have a lot to contribute.
Regards,
Lynne
Linda, Lynne and I are planning to meet Sunday at the Nottoway Pow wow this weekend. Are you coming as well?
Vance, you made a comment about being skeptical that a trait such as shovel teeth would be so common among mixed blooded people. If it’s a dominant trait it could be extremely common. There’s a story about Croatia. It was originally populated by the Illyrians who were destroyed by the Slavs, all but a few women who were absorbed into the population. Archeologists could pinpoint the invasion because a particular skull type disappeared from the burials in that century. But 500 years later, the skull type had returned. It was a dominant trait. So . . . if shovel teeth are also dominant they could become a marker for Indian descent in a multi-racial population, even when the degree of Indian blood is extremely small. All it takes is enough time for the trait to percolate through the population.
Linda, I think you should just forget the “melungeon’ word as related to these traits and just consider them Native. That’s what I’ve always understood. Certainly the epicanthic fold to your eyelid is a Native trait.
Roy, glad to see you’ve found your way back here. Good to see you.
Oh, also, Wynne’s are in my ex’s family. Actually the Carter name is by way of adoption. My name really should be Wynne. And there are Whites, Smith and Allens in my direct and indirect lines. I have an ancestor named Elizabeth Smith, too, from a line that migrated to the midwest. The Allens were in a cousin’s line he’s sure were Indian from eastern Virginia.
hi Sue Janz,
I have not looked at the website yet but I know it will be of interest because all three of these Etheridge men where my great grandfathers Caleb and Nathan were my 5th great grandfathers and Aaron was my 6th great Grandfather as he is Caleb’s father. thank you so much!!!!
Linda
Linda,
My Elizabeth had many brothers and sisters although they had different mothers. I know some of them went into Granville County and then went west from there. I’ll check and see were they went would be cool if we are related:)
Linda
Opps Linda I forgot to answer your question in my last post. I will not be able to attend. I live in South Alabama and my brother is coming down from North Carolina and he is just coming back from Iraq and I have not seen him in a long time so I am staying here to see him. He’s my baby brother and I just have to see him.
Linda
You guys are not going to believe this….but take my word for it sometimes genealogy is not a good thing one can learn things that really aren’t good to know. Some lineages are well documented in books and publications a long long time before America was ever thought of( to the English mind that is). A doctor up in New York contacted us just last night with some information that has really sent me spinning. He noticed that our ancestor William Ruffin married Faith Gray of Surry county. He descends from her as well. He told us to take a look at his website so we did. This line is documented way back to 500BC.
Within this line are Kings of England, Scotland, France, Italy and so on. This is the direct lineage of William the Conquerer and Emperor Charlemagne. I guess I don’t have to tell you just how freaked out I am especially since i read all the notes and heard of all these crazy beheadings. I would tell him he’s full of **** but he quotes all of his sources. I’m seriously thinking about hanging this genealogy stuff up. If I keep looking I might end up not knowing who the **** I am.
Linda
Linda,
First of all, congradulations on finding your Nottoway ancestors.
AND I hope you don’t really give up on tracing family. ALL of us here, if we were to go back in time far enough, would find atrocities committed by some ancestor I believe. 500 BC, 500 years plus 2005? In 2505 years, goodness! In my one line I have the name Hess. My first thought when I saw that was what if she is connected to Herman Hess, one of Hitlers right hand men? Well, I would feel terrible so I can see how you could be freaked out. But if we could all go back that many years we probably would all find some scary stuff. I just want to concentrate on the last 350-400 years or so, that’s far enough back in time. Hope you’re feeling better. Sue J
Quest for facts,
I’d be suspicious of anyone with a “proven” genealogy back 2,500 years. One wrong link and the whole thing comes tumbling down.
I wouldn’t worry about the beheadings too much tho. Back just a few generations people all over the world (Including American Indians) were pretty brutal by todays standards.
vance
I made a mistake on that I went and looked again it’s 500 AD so it’s only 1500 years. It’s the Plantagenet Dynasty. Also if you remember my surnames I also have Maddox and Llewlyn. These familes are said to descend from Llewlyn the Great King of Wales. Now I don’t know for sure if my lines descend from there or not and I don’t have any plans to research but anyway John I Lackland King of England had an illegimate daughter who married Llewlyn the Great and this is were the House of Tudor descends from (BTW John I is one of the Plantagenet dynasty.) The house of Tudor(Henry VII, HenryVIII, and Elizabeth I). Like I said he quotes all of his sources for this, I plan to get my hands on some of these sources and look myself. I need to go to the library.
Linda
Originally posted by Linda
Vance, you made a comment about being skeptical that a trait such as shovel teeth would be so common among mixed blooded people. If it’s a dominant trait it could be extremely common. There’s a story about Croatia. It was originally populated by the Illyrians who were destroyed by the Slavs, all but a few women who were absorbed into the population. Archeologists could pinpoint the invasion because a particular skull type disappeared from the burials in that century. But 500 years later, the skull type had returned. It was a dominant trait. So . . . if shovel teeth are also dominant they could become a marker for Indian descent in a multi-racial population, even when the degree of Indian blood is extremely small. All it takes is enough time for the trait to percolate through the population.
You know, after talking to Vance about SSI, I took a quick look on the net and saw that an anthropologist, who is also a dentist, was doing some work in a Carribean Island, and noted that much of the population had SSI. This was received as good news to some people on that island who felt that their Indian heritage had been overlooked, and that they now had a genetic marker to “prove” their significant NA heritage. Naturally these people were of mixed blood.
Linda writes:
Linda, I think you should just forget the “melungeon’ word as related to these traits and just consider them Native. That’s what I’ve always understood. Certainly the epicanthic fold to your eyelid is a Native trait.
genetic drift will always win in the end. There are a cluster of traits associated with NA heritage…you may have some of them, all of them, none of them….OR your children may show up with some/none/all. To digress here, I remember Vance writing about skin color at one point….even to anthropologists, skin color is not a determinant of anything. The reason being, there is too much variation even among close relatives, neighbors who live in and have lived for long periods in, close quarters. Anthroplogists threw out skin color over 80 years ago. In the past a scale of color had been developed, from the Old World, to use as a descriptive tool among anthropologists in describing new populations ( newly discovered that is). It didn’t work. The range was so great even in village populations, that all it could do was give a more detailed description of one individual. It was useless to be of any use even in a limited…very limited population.
There is also the question of dominance and frequency. Blue eyes are a recessive trait, brown eyes a dominant one. However, the frequency of the blue eyed allel…hope I spelled that right…is greater than the brown eyed one…this means that it will be carried as a recessive trait and show up at the first chance it gets. Example: one parent with brown eyes has a blue and a brown gene. The second parent has two blue eye genes. Out of 4 children, the odds are that three will have blue eyes. Three out of four. Even though the brown is dominant, the blue will be passed on with greater frequency.
Looking forward to seeing you this Sunday, Linda!
Regards,
Lynne
I think I said this before. My sister had a facelift covered by insurance, because her eyelid covered so much of her eye that she could not see. The plastic surgeon told her that the only way she could have this was if she had some NA or Asian in her ancestry. She has blond hair and blue eyes like our German father.
So, one physician opinion weighing in here.
Techteach
Well I am more skeptical than I was, but I was skeptical beforehand. I’ve been told brown eyes are dominant yet 3 or 4 children born to a Blue/brown eyed couple will have blue eyes??? Same for skin color — light skin color will prvail??? YET shovel teeth and eyes will remain??? Why wouldn’t the traits be reversed, meaning shovel teeth be lost and skin color, eye color remain?
This goes against all I’ve seen in everyday life. I see dark complected 1/2 and 1/4th blood. Dad and all his 8 brothers and sisters had brown eyes and were dark complected, high cheek bones. From researching he was probably 1/4th to 3/8th Indian. I see light skin prevail when you get to 1/8th blood or there about as well as “green eyes” if the white parent had blue eyes at 1/8th blood as well. I have that bump, had the shovel teeth, and the toe et cetera . . . I have green eyes too — very green. My mother was blue-eyed and blonde — German/Scots-Irish.
The full blood Cherokees I’ve seen are a little darker than Plains Indians, not lighter. I’ve seen this change in my family in person and in photographs, from grandma and my great uncles & aunts to today, my grandkids generation, who harldly appear Indian at all.
vance
Originally posted by vance hawkins
Well I am more skeptical than I was, but I was skeptical beforehand. I’ve been told brown eyes are dominant yet 3 or 4 children born to a Blue/brown eyed couple will have blue eyes??? Same for skin color — light skin color will prvail??? YET shovel teeth and eyes will remain??? Why wouldn’t the traits be reversed, meaning shovel teeth be lost and skin color, eye color remain?
Heh. Vance, I’m not a genetisist, I am a mailman (woman). These are things that I remember from college. As regarding the frequency of the blue eyed alleal….I am repeqating what I learned about 30 years ago. I don’t think that the frequency of lighter skin is on the same level of frequency as the blue eyed alleal. In fact, I don’t know what the frequency of lighter skin is. I would have to do some research on it.
Remember, since there are 2 genes from each parent, for the example of 3 out of 4 would have to work like this:
Mom has brown eyes; but she carries a recessive blue eyed alleal. In her case the brown eyed alleal is dominant. Her phenotype is to be brown eyed.
Dad has blue eyes; he carries only blue eyed alleals. His phenotype is to be blue eyed.
When these two combine, the only one who can contribute a brown eyed alleal is Mom, but out of 4 children….and this is a statistical picutre…she will contribute the blue eyed alleal 3 times out of four. This statistical profile was built up after hundreds of studies, so, its a generalisation. Thus, 3 out of four of their children would have blue eyes. The fourth, a brown eyed child, will carry a recessive blue eyed alleal.
If this fourth brown eyed child has children with a mate who has only brown eyed alleals, the child will have brown eyes, because brown is dominant. There is a chance that the child will have greenish eyes, but in the main, the eyes will be brown. However, this fourth child may carry the recessive blue eyed trait, and pass it on as a recessive trait, depending on the other parent of any child born to it, until it resurfaces again. Then again, this fourth child may have inherited only brown eyed alleals.
All of this stands good for all of the NA traits mentioned. I don’t know the frequency of these other traits. Drift, is when a trait is carried as a recessive trait for X number of generations, and will show up periodically, when it meets another recessive trait, OR runs into a trait over which it has dominance.
IF there is no way to pick up a trait through heritage, it just won’t show up at all.
When you talk about skin color, you are talking about Melanin in the upper layers of the dermis. I do not know the frequency of lighter/darker melanin in the population….but we can all see that melanin recombines is varying ways, even within families. The same goes for hair color. Blonde hair, plus black hair, will yeild red hair in some recombinations. Did you know that there are actually many red haired arabs? Once you have a very mixed population, these various recessive and dominant traits, combined with the frequency of certain alleals, will yeild a lot of variation.
Many asians also have SSI. Neanderthal and Cro Magnon had SSIs. This particular trait is associated with certain populations. This doesn’t mean that they ALL have them, just a statistically significant number.
Vance writes:
This goes against all I’ve seen in everyday life. I see dark complected 1/2 and 1/4th blood. Dad and all his 8 brothers and sisters had brown eyes and were dark complected, high cheek bones. From researching he was probably 1/4th to 3/8th Indian. I see light skin prevail when you get to 1/8th blood or there about as well as “green eyes” if the white parent had blue eyes at 1/8th blood as well. I have that bump, had the shovel teeth, and the toe et cetera . . . I have green eyes too — very green. My mother was blue-eyed and blonde — German/Scots-Irish.
I can’t deny what you’ve seen. The admixture of various genotypes will yeild variation. I don’t think that anyone here denies that their blood is very mixed. I am certainly very mixed. However, the characteristics associated with NA heritage are showing up in myself and various members of this forum. They got there through heritage. They are a product of Drift and gene recombination. Without the NA heritage, the likelyhood of these traits showing up are very slim.
Vance writes:
The full blood Cherokees I’ve seen are a little darker than Plains Indians, not lighter. I’ve seen this change in my family in person and in photographs, from grandma and my great uncles & aunts to today, my grandkids generation, who harldly appear Indian at all.
If you are using skin color, I can see why you would say that. Just to be the devil here, consider what you just said: that the Cherokee are darker than the Plains Indians. Does this mean that the Plains Indians aren’t NA? Skin color is an easy marker for people to use. If skin color is what they want to use, there’s really no way to stop them. Look at it this way…if I had black hair and darker skin, AND looked exactly the same way that I do now, I could be a poster child for Pochahantas. At least so my husband tells me. I never gave it much thought. Its all a product of recombinant DNA and Drift.
Lynne
Originally posted by quest for facts
Opps Linda I forgot to answer your question in my last post. I will not be able to attend. I live in South Alabama and my brother is coming down from North Carolina and he is just coming back from Iraq and I have not seen him in a long time so I am staying here to see him. He’s my baby brother and I just have to see him.
Linda
Great news that you brother is returning from Iraq. He must be coming in from Ft Bragg. Welcome home to him!
Yours,
Lynne
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