My DNA and the documentation is coming from Ancestry.com.
Our grandson who is very good in math and is basically, as he calls himself a white guy went over the math, when he visited for a weekend this spring. His knowledge of these ratios/%’s came from a math class in an excellent private school.
First, he used my new report showing African DNA showing up in my profile of 3% as an example, from my Dad’s side. The African DNA does not show up on any living relatives on my Mothers side.
The math from our Grandson: My Dad would have had 6%, his Dad 12%, that guy’s Dad would have been 24% (all rounded off). That would had my Dad’s African DNA line back to a generation or so before the civil war about 10-24% without some interlopers tossing in their DNA.
My siblings, who have had DNA testing, show basically the same % as mine, and their children/grand kids are showing 1-2% African DNA. Their tests are in that % ball park. So the undocumented African DNA comes from my Dad’s family.
Then, the ‘mystery’ comes into play. On my mothers side’s a lot of supposedly Ancestry documented Cherokees and other tribes,?. These documentations appear in the 1700 to 1800’s in the Ancestry Files. These “Indians” married our Uk/Scottish/Irish ancestors from the mid 1700 to mid the 1800s.
Yet, zero Indian DNA shows up in my tests, my siblings and their adult children and kids.
On Ancestry, we have identified 100’s of first to 4th generation cousins, on my mother’s side, who have had DNA testing by Ancestry with that family line. None of them show any Indian DNA.
Ancestry has had a big increase in the numbers of people purchasing the DNA tests in recent months. They have put some of us on various Beta programs to test and report back to them.
I have been on an Ancestry Beta DNA reporting testing system for over a month. I have been averaging 4-8 new cousins per day.
This Beta testing allows me to check on their DNA to see where their ancestors came from. No names re ancestors just the % of their estimated DNA’s & where those DNA’s came from. For example the African DNA has run from 1% to 24% in some of these new cousins on my Dad’s side of the DNA families and zero American Indian blood on either my Dad’s side or my mother’s side.
Their new programs have some very powerful tools to identify DNA and not identities unless the users allow it.
DNA traces blood lines; documentation who lives together. The Hemmings family, because of their blood relationship with the Jefferson family, had the option of selectively misplacing (or even altering) documentation so they could pass as white, an avenue many of them chose.
Now that it is no longer fashionable to be white, they can use their DNA testing to highlight their African roots. The Hemmings are just one famous example.
Pure speculation on my part, but 18th century Indians, especially in Pennsylvania (but I would assume among the Cherokee as well), were subjected to a severe reduction of their ranks, not only due to contacts with disease to which they had no immunity (especially smallpox) but internal resource conflicts with competing tribes as they were pushed west into every shrinking territory.
Incorporation of enemy captives, including white settlers, into their tribes was a part of the culture. After a generation or so, these captives would lose their former identity completely and become a member of the tribe. This was not a rare happening, it was quite normal. Indeed, some tribes on the frontier (from both the Indian and the white perspective) were majority captive.
Indeed, Ben Franklin observed that captives steeped in Indian culture, once they made the conversion, could not be cajoled back into white culture because the material benefits of doing so was zero to small whereas the loss of freedom was too great.
So your documentation may be true, but no DNA markers because former captives married former captives. Rare for sure, but not impossible.
Sounds like you're doing everything right, regardless. I had a relative handful of pretty close DNA relatives, and not one of them were even remotely familiar, and where I could check, not even one family tree hooked in to mine. And the best part was, not one of them returned my pvt msg.