[Vigilanteman]

Chances are better than 50-50 that anyone who can trace their ancestry back to frontier America will have at least some Native American heritage.

A few reasons for this are:

1. Shortage of women among white frontier populations versus a surplus among Native frontier populations. The former was due to the fact that white men were the first to push westward in search of land or wealth to be mined. The Native American population either lost men resisting this expansion or offered surplus females as marriage partners in an attempt to gain gain alliances or trading partners. Much as both major parties now try to outdo each other in slobbering over the Hispanic voters.
   
2. Relative isolation and small pool of available marriage partners, or the same reason you will find virtually everyone related in isolated communities ranging from West Virginia mining towns to Rocky Mountain ranch towns. This was perfectly normal until the advent of the automobile and its widespread use, starting in the 1950's-- a relatively recent period of American History.
   
3. Cherokee heritage, in particular, is the most common of Native American heritage. As the major one of the five civilized tribes, Cherokee were clever adapters at producing a written language which became the norm for the tribe in a single generation, using the U.S. court system to resist expulsion, retreating to the hills of the Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky when that failed, then ultimately to Oklahoma.
   
4. All five of the so-called civilized tribes (the other four being the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole) backed the south in our Civil War and, as a result, had to adapt quickly to survive. One of the quickest ways was intermarriage with the white and black populations in the southeast. The hit network series Who Do You Think You Are pretty much verifies that some Native American DNA is widespread in the bloodlines of almost everyone who can trace their ancestry to the frontier era for the aforementioned reasons. In fact, absence is more the exception than the rule.

[muawiyah]

ALL the oldest colonial families have an Indian ancestor ~ the biggest problem in tracking down that ancestor (or a dozen or two) has been folks who've gone into source documents and simply destroyed that information feeling that it was disadvantageous to have an Indian ancestor.

During the 1500s Spain established a substantial infrastructure along the Mississippi, the Ohio, the St. Joseph and the Great miami Rivers ~ today almost all of that history is nothing but a jotting in an old family Bible, or a tracing on the ground, or maybe a boundry marker with words.

People are putting it together on the internet in a hundred communities where it is meaningful.

Eventually we'll be opening up the deerhides at Fonda NY and finding out what they say.

[x]

Maybe if your ancestors were on the frontier long enough.

But we know a lot about the ancestry of the US presidents, and so far as I know, genealogists haven't really been able to connect any of them with Indian ancestors, though claims were made for Coolidge and Clinton and the Bushes.

Charles Curtis, Hoover's vice president actually was an Indian, though, and Rick Perry is supposed to be part Choctaw.

We don't know just how Cherokee Warren's ancestor is supposed to be. That great-great-great-grandmother may have been a member of the tribe but have been only partly of native American ancestry herself.

Somebody may be able to double check that ancestor (Sarah Smith) at a US census records or genealogical website.