Ancestry Again

Hanging around on comparative family tree sites, I have a lot of visible overlap with a few people who arrived in the 1700s in Virginia from the British Isles. It's fun to read their names and dates and ponder the vast chain of ancestry.

Nowadays the family tree fans are trying to verify the branches with DNA data. Most official family trees, over time, will bury some family secrets concerning true parentage. This seems to be less often the case than many skeptics had expected, as it turns out.

In my case, for example, people with whom I share a family tree branch are also popping up as DNA relatives on 23andMe.

But some people pop as distant DNA relative - third to fifth cousins - and neither of us have ANY idea of how that came to be.

Allegedly, I have a Native American ancestor, on my mother's side apparently. What tribe, I don't know.

I'm hoping that its Pottawatamie,
Because that word sounds cool to me.