Family lore is that my great-grandfather Finnacom was a land prospector in what is now West Virgina. After one of his trips(around 1883) he came back with an "Indian Princess" as the new housekeeper for him and his barren wife. Shortly thereafter she became pregnant, he divorced the wife and married the "Indian Princess"/maid. After 6 kids she took off with some other guy, leaving the 2 youngest kids (including my grandmother who was 2) in an orphanage. Seven years later their dad got them out. My grandmother's life was a total soap opera and she didn't like talking about her mom or early life, but the story is likely true (minus the "Princess" part.) The records of her are odd. On a 1910 census (the year after my grandmother was born and 1 year before the lady in question took off) her name was listed as Eugenia Scott Finnacom, age 35. But there's no birth certificate for her, no death certificate, and no record at all after she dissappeared. Plus, no one in the family knew her name...Eugenia is just per that 1910 census. All the relatives never referred to her by name and said they never talked to her because she didn't speak English.

One of the nicest things about being adopted as an infant with a sealed history is that I get to imagine what my genealogic background might be. I can be fierce, reckless Celt, or passionate Italian (H says my eyes are in all the Italian paintings of a certain era), lost Russian, German, French, whatever. I do know one thing though, if I claimed Native American lineage, it would be through my father's fathers. Everyone has Cherokee blood on their grandmother's side, like there were no Indian men. What's that about?

ETA: Isn't First Nations a strictly Canadian term? Although I prefer it to Native American, since the first nations on this continent were not actually native to it.

Girls were more likely to be abducted and/or raped than boys....

eta: and yes, First Nations is a Canadian term not used in the US

That's obviously true, erin. Though those family histories have the girl in question leaving her tribe and family for the white world in a haze of twoo wuv for her handsome "husband".

go just three generations back, anywhere on the family tree, and not one of our ancestors would have been considered white by the USian cultural standards of their time

I loved what Jon Stewart did on that last week, with Bill O'Reilly bemoaning the death of "traditional America."

It was super interesting to discuss with my mom today some of the conversations we had yesterday with the conservative extended family. It was so good to be with just my mom! It's literally been years.

Heh, sounds like a lot of family revisionism...I'm pretty sure everyone in mom's family agrees that our progenitor was not at all happy with finding herself in Northern Va in some white guy's house. But she stuck around for over a decade.

Everyone has Cherokee blood on their grandmother's side, like there were no Indian men. What's that about?

Not many women came over alone, I would imagine is part of it.

My Dad's grandparents all came to the US from Finland, and he was proud of his Finnish heritage. I dug around via ancestry.com, and once you go back a ways there's all kinds of input from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. So it's more of a Finno-Scandanavian melange. Dad would have been a bit disappointed, but I'm not. If anything, it makes my Viking fascination make more sense.

There's no Native American genes on either side of my family, that I'm aware of.

Mother was not pleased to discover German heritage, but she grew up in World War II and tended to pick up weird antipathies. She didn't like the Irish part, either. I never told her about the Dutch/Moroccan pirate.

ION, Hubby's frying bacon. Baa-aa-acon. Num.

Much of the mixing of Indian and African American genes probably came from the fact that runaway slaves were adopted into or were at least allowed to live with Indian tribes from when the Spanish brought the first slaves to the New World.

Many Indian tribes already had slaves, usually captives from other tribes, when the Europeans arrived. It was not usually a hereditary slavery, though. As someone said, the Cherokee adopted the form of slavery of their Southern neighbors, as part of their futile hope that becoming "civilized" would allow them to keep their land.