My line supposedly by Pocahontas' niece, Nikitti, Martha Davis, Eliz. Venable,,,Mary Morton, to my mom is T2b2!. [closed]

Question

My line supposedly by Pocahontas' niece, Nikitti, Martha Davis, Eliz. Venable,,,Mary Morton, to my mom is T2b2!. [closed]

I do not recall seeing anything in the form of documentation, history etc about the family of Pochontas other than mentin of her father and husband, John Rolfe. and I doubt seriously that anyone knows her mtDNA haplogroup. Much less being able to track it through 9, 10, 11 generations.

It seems that almost every family, south of the Mason Dixon line, has in it some myth about an Indian ancestor. Including mine. I was told that there was an "Indian Princess" in my family tree.

Well the Indians did not have Kings, Queens, Princess's, and leadership stations were not inheritable, they were conferred by councils based on competency and trust. Pocohontas was not a Princess, anymore than her father was a King, but Europeans used their culture references and apparently still do.

Anyway neither DNA nor intense genealogical research has proven that there is even on small segment of native American DNA in the family.

Then again my fathers side of the family, including myself, manifest physical evidence that would lead one to believe such. But it is not backed up by DNA or research. Then again there are a number of dead ends with 2nd great grandparents on my fathers side. Mom's side is "yankee" and definitely not even had the opportunity to intermarry with natives.

commented Jul 30, 2018 by Living Farrar G2G6 Mach 1 (15.9k points)

Yes, the red Indians did (and still do) have kings and other nobility. They are condescendingly called "chiefs" by oligarchic "republican" modern Americans who don't want what God gives them by primogeniture to be their ruler but, who want to install their own henchman ("chief" being sort of like "Alpha males", like of a dog pack, etc.--though the white attempt to debase the Indians to the "level" of animals, reflected in such recent usage of the term "range" for Native countries, fails to offend on the Indian level since the red Indians would consider animals to be "elevated" to the level of fellow, only foreign, people!). The Native terms for what the whites insist on calling "chief" are correctly translated as "king", "lord", etc. They may or may not have been subject to any "election" (and that not usually by the majority of the common people of a tribe, nation, etc.) just as were English kings before primogeniture was established as the rule of succession (and, considering the "Acclamation" required for Coronation, they still are "elected"). All the stuff about "yeah, every Southerner has a 'Cherokee princess for a grandmother' disdain of overwhelming family testimonies that should be taken as evidence to be considered for inquiry, rather than just un-scientifically dismissed out of hand as being "myth" is, in itself, what has all the telltale marks of being the real myth. The uncomfortable revelations that anything other than the established "scientific" dogma raises is what the "scientific" community seems to be hell-bent on silencing. Nevertheless, for real scientific inquiry, those who do have documented (though, of course, even the documentation will be rejected by those who don't like having to accept the implications of its results) maternal descent from the Pamnkey/Powhatan Royal lineage--yes it is a Royal lineage, no matter how much that hurts the "republican" paradigm of oligarchic "democracy"--will have to come forward with dna results for those with objective minds to know the truth, yea or nay, about the actual haplogroup that is Pau Pawiske's maternal descent. I, myself, would like to know the actual truth, instead of just being condescended to by the extremely un-scientific "myth" mantra about whatever uncomfortable questions I do bring up. (I see the "I'm not a robot" "Verify" test has been upped to ban me from posting my uncomfortable questions as well by making me pass, over and over again, the same test--often with very ambiguous choices that most people would flunk, by the criteria required of them)

commented Jul 30, 2018 by anonymous

It is truth that early settlers of the 1600-1700s did indeed marry or have children by American Indians. Many Chief’s daughters were matched with White men as a form of Peace & Trade until Treaties were broken. These matches may be were the nickname “Indian Princess” began. My own father told me that I also Descendant from such. In our earliest history, many men left the Colony to join the Indians rather then starve. It is also true that All Races were mixing at the time, which caused Laws Against this to form. Yet this did not stop. When you study the Surnames of Known Confirmed Indian Bloodlines, you will find White Names such as Cox, Evans, Chavis, Palmer, and many others. Do Not dismiss oral history stories without truly investigated them first. Many American Indians have DNA of European, Sub-Saharan African, and Others! Many White Americans also have DNA of same, and also that of American Indian. When uploading your DNA to GedMatch, you may find further Nationalities as I did. A True Genealogist must keep an Open Mind when doing their Genealogy. Do Not Judge or Dismiss our Ancestors. Please Do Not Argue Against Others, but Help Eachother Discover the Truths. Thanks.

commented Jul 31, 2018 by Living B G2G Rookie (290 points)

Interesting. As regards Peace and Trade. That phrase is new to me. I will have to research it.

As regards Indian and African DNA showing up in autosomal DNA. Not much chance of that unless a 4th great grandparent was 100% (not half and half, but 100% Native American or African.

Is such ancestry is not confirmed by DNA then we are in the realm of myth and wishful thinking. Given that it might indeed be a fact that a lineage has at some distant point an Indian or African ancestor, but it just can't be confirmed by DNA. And that upsets the marketing cart of ancestry.com and 23andme.

As regards helping others. That is what I do when I link profiles to ancestors and I have done a lot of that, however one is not helping anyone by humoring them or helping them to perpetuate a fantasy.

Then again there is a lot of that going around today.

Most important thing of all is stay factual and provable, that way you avert heartburn and disappointment.

commented Jul 31, 2018 by Living Farrar G2G6 Mach 1 (15.9k points)

"Red Indians"! Can we not refer to people by their tribal designation, or failing that by Native, Indigenous or Indian? Red Indian makes me feel like I'm watching Disney's racist Peter Pan movie.

Many people are determined to believe they have NA ancestry. If neither science nor history mean anything to you, then believe what you want. You can be the secret 5th generation love child of Pocahontas and John Smith if you want. I believe these Cherokee princess myths were created and propagated by Americans who prefer to imagine that they inherited this continent, rather than conquered it. I've known real Native Americans who've been treated like scum and called slurs, right here and now in the 21st century, then I come on Wikitree to find people waxing poetic about their Indian maiden progenitor that is somewhere on their Pa-paw's mother's mother's side, who was of the blood of chieftains mind you, not some rank and file Indians.

commented Aug 2, 2018 by Jessica Key

Sorry, haven't read all the comments so this might've been covered...

My mtDNA is T2b4b. There are a couple of ways that the T2b2 hgp might've been introduced pre-1492 into Native American peoples. Through the east coast via Vikings or migration to the west coast through Berengia.

T2b2 was found in Viking populations (e.g., Viking Warrior Woman in Birka) and other Northern European populations. There was a Viking settlement dating back to 1021 in Newfoundland with evidence of trade w NA ppl. It wouldn't have been unusual for a Viking settlement to include women. Or that a Viking woman would choose a NA mate. There were probably other settlements that haven't been found yet.

Scientist studying ancient DNA had hypothesized that the DNA of the population living in the area that migrated to the Americas shared about 30% of the genome with modern Northern European populations and 70% with modern Eastern Asian populations. The DNA of the Ma'lta boy who lived app 25,000 yrs ago confirmed that hypothesis. Ancient populations moved around a LOT.

The T2b2 hgp could have migrated through Berengia to America. Either the line died out in the West or those ppl continued directly to the East coast. If the T2b2 hgp didn't die out in the west and was found in a modern NA, it would probably be dismissed as a later European admixture.

The DNA of Eastern Native Americans is typically not studied or included in DNA companies' reference populations due to the concern that it has been mixed with European DNA.

My family has had many intermarriages, some recent, with Eastern Native Americans including an "Indian Princess", Elizabeth of the Nansemond (yes, the 10 generations since that marriage are documented. The modern Nansemond tribe is comprised solely of her descendants). However, many of my cousins only show European ancestry because DNA from Eastern NAs is not used AND modern NAs derive 30% of their genome from an ancient population that many northern Europeans also descended from. I have abt 4% NA and 96% N European autosomal DNA.

EDITED to correct T2b2b4b to T2b4b

commented Dec 12, 2021 by D Carroll G2G Rookie (100 points)
edited Mar 26, 2022 by D Carroll

I agree with Kathie...though she's the resident NA authority; I'm just a DNA dweeb. I suppose there is the possibility that there was admixture, though I imagine it would have been quite minimal and certainly nothing significant, resulting from the 1021 L'Anse aux Meadows Viking settlement (Kuitems, et al. Nature; 2021).

The confusion about 30% European DNA came, I believe, from the rather sensationalist headlines surrounding that 2013 research paper about the ancient remains in Mal'ta that D. Carroll mentioned (Raghavan, et al. Nature 505, 87-91); I even remember seeing specific mentions of the "amazing" connection discovered between NA founding populations and the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish. Sigh.

Problem is, while the research paper was solid (though, back then the best they could achieve was a 1X sequencing depth, which is weak by today's standards) the headlines leapfrogged over several thousands of years of history. Nobody asked, but I'll give my two cents and try not to run too long...

The primary remains, dubbed MA-1, that Raghavan and company analyzed were retrieved from south-central Siberia. The settlement where the remains were found, Mal'ta, is near the southern end of Lake Baikal, essentially where the town of Irkutsk is today, about 100 miles north of today's border with Mongolia. These remains were dated to an estimated 24,000 years (and the mtDNA haplogroup was U, by the way). Another subject was mentioned in the research paper: Afontova Gora-2, dated to about 17,000 years ago and had "similar" genetic signatures to the Mal'ta specimen.

These dates would place them as living in the region during the period of greatest ice coverage--which ran roughly from 25,000 to about 19,000 years ago--of the Last Glacial Maximum, during which time much of Europe and Asia was inaccessible for human travel over long distances. The ice sheets started to decline in the north some 15,000 years ago, which is when the Bering land bridge was likely exposed and NA founder populations entered the Americas.

There was no significant Eurasian emigration west, east, or north during the LGM period of greatest coverage, so it's reasonable to think that the south-central Siberian branch was already in that location before or near the start of the period of greatest ice coverage.

It wasn't until after the LGM that a lineage (over 40,000 years old) called Western Hunter-Gatherer (WHG) emerged about 15,000 years ago (Jones, et al. Nature Communications 6(1); 2015) to populate Europe after the ice age, and they spanned as far as Britain. The other principal genetic group at the time was the Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG); the Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer, who moved north, was genetically an admixture of the WHG and EHG (Kashuba, Nature Research 2(105); 2019).

Widely dispersed across Europe, the WHG were substantively replaced by successive waves of Early European Farmers (EFF) who migrated in large numbers from Asia Minor into the Balkans during the early and middle Neolithic and through the Chalcolithic around 6,500 years ago. The EFF had a large presence of yDNA haplogroup G, and also E, C, J, H, and T, and were responsible for what we term the Linear Pottery culture in Europe and the Cardial Ware culture along the Mediterranean (Olalde, et al. PLoS Genetics 32(12): 3132-3142; 2015).

Starting around 6,000 years ago and through the early Bronze Age, the EEF in Europe were essentially overrun by a massive expansion of Western Steppe Herders. These invasions are what led to yDNA in Europe being mostly replaced with the R haplogroup (Haak, et al. Nature 522(7555): 207-211; 2015).

That's the very imprecise but very fast run-through of European history from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Bronze Age. And remember, the Mal'ta remains date to 24,000 years ago...almost 10,000 years before Europe saw three, paradigm-changing, population replacement events. Modern Europeans do carry genetic markers from the Mal'ta peoples. But we also carry Neanderthal DNA...which makes up about 2% of European and Asian genomes.

A paper by Joanna Gautney and Trent Holliday (Journal of Archaeological Science 58: 103-112; 2015) did some fancy calculations and came up with the world's entire habitable land area during the LGM as 29.7 million square miles. From that they estimated that the total human population was about 3 million, spread across all continents. Pretty sparse. Today I live in a city that has about 2.5 times the population of the entire world at that time.

What the researchers who wrote the Mal'ta paper hypothesized was that a branch of Western Hunter-Gatherers moved east and interbred with Eastern Hunter-Gatherers before or during the Last Glacial Maximum. It was that same Western Hunter-Gatherer lineage that had already been in Western Eurasia, and then returned after the ice age. There was nothing in the research that ever implied NA founder populations contained modern Western or Northern European DNA, nothing more recent than the ice age. Which DNA was also subsequently spread further east and north into Asia after the LGM, and that traces of it can be found in NA founder populations is in keeping with the Bering Strait migration hypothesis.

commented Dec 13, 2021 by Edison Williams G2G6 Pilot (441k points)

The information that there was an ancient population living in northern Eurasia whose descendants migrated east to Siberia then onto the Americas while other descendants migrated west to northern Europe came from the 2018 book "Who We Are and How We Got Here" written by David Reich a professor in the genetics department of Harvard Medical School. He was also part of the team that decoded the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes.

From Part II Chapter 4:

Northern Europeans are a mixture of ancient populations "one of which shared more ancestry with present-day Native Americans than with any other population living today." Modern NA DNA is a mixture of about 30% ancient northern Eurasian & 70% east Asian.

commented Mar 26, 2022 by D Carroll G2G Rookie (100 points)
edited Mar 26, 2022 by D Carroll

Well, the information predates Reich's book by at least five or six years. In that chapter Reich described a paper he had co-authored in 2009 but never published, titled "Ancient Mixture in the Ancestry of Native Americans." He then went on describe the reason for not publishing was that he and his colleagues devised a different statistical test, the "Three Population Test." Using this model, "What we had found was evidence that people in northern Europe, such as the French, are descended from a mixture of populations, one of which shared more ancestry with present-day Native Americans than with any other population living today."

They coined the term "Ancient North Eurasians" for the extinct population that "would without a doubt have been called a 'race' had they lived today, as we could show that they must have been genetically about as differentiated from all other Eurasian populations who lived at the time as today's 'West Eurasians,' 'Native Americans,' and 'East Asians' are from one another. Although they have not left unmixed descendants, the Ancient North Eurasians have in fact been extraordinarily successful.... All told, more than half the world's population derives between 5 percent and 40 percent of their genomes from the Ancient North Eurasians."

This work was done presumably circa 2010-2012 because the next section of Chapter 4 is titled, "The Ghost is Found": "At the end of 2013, Eske Willerslev and his colleagues published genome-wide data from the bones of a boy who had lived at the Mal'ta site in south-central Siberia around twenty-four thousand years ago." On page 298 of the book you'll find the citation for this entry to be the same one I made in my post December 13: M. Raghavan et al., "Upper Palaeolithic Siberian Genome Reveals Dual Ancestry of Native Americans," Nature 505 (2014): 87–91. The paper was published 20 November 2013 and appeared in that 2014 issue of Nature.

"What Willerslev and colleagues found went far beyond what we had been able to do by relying on only modern populations.... The finding that several of the great populations outside of Africa today are profoundly mixed was at odds with what most scientists expected. Prior to the genome revolution, I, like most others, had assumed that the big genetic clusters of populations we see today reflect the deep splits of the past. But in fact the big clusters today are themselves the result of mixtures of very different populations that existed earlier. We have since detected similar patterns in every population we have analyzed: East Asians, South Asians, West Africans, southern Africans. There was never a single trunk population in the human past. It has been mixtures all the way down."

The Ancient North Eurasians Reich describes and for which the Mal'ta remains have become a "type specimen" date back, as I noted, to the Last Glacial Maximum, or around 19,000 to 25,000 years ago. The admixture history and traces are there in modern genomes, but with our low-resolution microarray autosomal tests those vestiges of Ancient North Eurasians wouldn't be specifically identifiable in Northern European, Native American, or any other modern populations. The first extraction run of the Mal'ta MA-1 remains resulted in 22.4 million bases, or markers tested. The final evaluation sequence used 19.2 million bases. Our microarray tests look only at about 3% of that number and it's quite likely there will be only a modest percentage of those that will overlap.

The genotyping cohorts for admixture the testing companies use extend to an estimate, as AncestryDNA writes, "of where your ancestors lived hundreds of years ago, as far back as around 1,000 years."

In my December 13 post I wrote, "There was nothing in the research that ever implied NA founder populations contained modern Western or Northern European DNA, nothing more recent than the ice age." You edited your December 12 post a few minutes after you wrote the one above, so I just want to be clear to everyone that on December 13 I was responding to the content of your original text.

commented Mar 26, 2022 by Edison Williams G2G6 Pilot (441k points)

3 Answers

Jessica Key · Answer 1 · 2018-07-28T22:53:20+0000

"T2b from the Middle East...." Yes, that's the standard dogma. And, yes, it did arise in the Middle East! Yet, there are claims of dna being extracted from around 4,000 year-old remains in Peru having the T2b haplogroup (a haplogroup, along with some others that are "not supposed to be in these populations" attested in several if not many Southeastern Native populations but, of course, incongruously dismissed as being Euro "admixture" though the contorted "explanations" of that admixture fail an Ockham's Razor test for probability far more than ones that the academic community simply don't want to accept). No independent researchers ("official" academia) want to verify this since it flies in the face of that "standard dogma" on which many their other beliefs are propped up. The presence of "Mexican", Caribbean or South American dna in Southern U.S. Natives also can be linked to migration from those regions--not just that Natives from what would become the Eastern U.S. had been sold into slavery in the Caribbean, as some mention (which did also appear to occur for sure). The peopling of the "Americas" isn't necessarily how the "authorities" pontificate that it was. Polynesia and/or, connections with the Western Old World should not be ruled out--just because the "authorities" dismiss evidence of it. We'll have to wait for further (probably many, many) maternal-line descendants to come forth with attested or "proven" maternal lineal descent from the Powhatan (especially the Pamunkey) to see if T2b may indeed be a haplogroup of those Natives--in spite of being unscientifically dismissed out of hand by "scientists" because it doesn't fit their favorite paradigms. The likelihood, of course, will be that even then, with indisputable evidence (if it's even acknowledged by "the authorities" in the matter), the interpretation of that evidence, as so often is the case, will be against what the evidence most logically proclaims and, instead, will be forced to "support" (stretched to fit) the standard dogma. We'll see.... In the meantime, all cookie-cutter "academic" claims about Native anything (or other things, for that matter) have to be viewed with much skepticism by the public. Academia have much too much of their preferred politics riding on their dogmas to allow any other than their interpretation to prevail--since prevalence, not inquiry, is the apparent name of their game.

commented Jul 29, 2018 by anonymous

Mtdna haplogroup X is also Middle Eastern. It's found in Anatolia in ancient times. How did it get to eastern North "America" in pre-Columbian times? (Solutrean Hypothesis?, Maybe, though the "iceberg" voyage theory itself seems wildly unrealistic) I won't even mention ydna haplogroup R (found in Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples without the European R1a or b subclades--though unscientifically "presumed" to be "R1b", and therefore, by implication, as--and virtually replacing any other at that!--colonial "admixture" rather than the uncomfortable reality of the Native "American" R being paternal to the Eurasian R1(a and b) and R2 subclades, as well as being the closest human male relative haplogroup to Q, the majority and only known other ydna haplogroup of the Natives of the "Americas").

commented Jul 30, 2018 by anonymous
edited Jul 30, 2018

New DNA studies have been finding that not all Native Americans share the same traditional findings. Some ancient burials have been linked to East Asia, North Western Europe, Iberian, Middle East and Africa.

Egyptian findings were discovered in the Grand Canyon. This indicates that there may have been more likely several Migration Routes & Dates. Perhaps a larger or newest Migration occurred during last Ice Age, but this was certainly not the first. Ancient discoveries have found that Natives were in North America & South America over 10,000-15,000 years ago!

Now, as far as American Indian DNA not showing up from over 6 or more generations ago, this would be frequent. We all don’t inherit the exact same mixture as our siblings or ancestors.

Therefore, some who have an “American Indian Princess or Prince Story” from 1600s may not ever know with DNA if their ancestors married Whites since. You can Upload to GedMatch for World Reports. I believe DNA will improve as information & new discoveries continue, as long as it is not suppressed. The results may be surprising. Perhaps Guilt may want us to be linked to Native Americans, but I feel that Oral History is what makes me want to dig up the Truth!

The fact is, the skin color & features still are being passed down!

I read somewhere that Pocahontas’s niece Nikitti, married a White man Hughes.

Look up Powhatan Surnames from Virginia. There are Many White Man’s Surnames associated with Native Americans! One can not be sure about those brick walls without investing. I have found a few History books worthy of a read.

The Powhatan Tribe did indeed mix with Whites (Males & Females).

I suggest you look up the “White” Surnames associated with each Tribe.

Check out Davis Floyd Genealogy & Hughes DNA Project. Perhaps you should start your own Project for the Female side. Don’t give up your search!

commented Aug 6, 2018 by Living B G2G Rookie (290 points)

Answer 2 · 2018-08-02T00:05:09+0000

I would first and foremost direct anyone who cares about the governmental structure and what it meant for the North Atlantic Tribes to read the Federation of the 5 Nations. Thomas Jefferson had a copy of it in his library and Ben Franklin quoted from it. Many historians believe parts of our Constitution were pulled from it while others refute that idea. http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24099

There are some interesting parallels. Yes Jefferson Europeanized (is that a word?) it but you can see the parallels. Now, move south... the Cherokee have a different governmental structure.   Every tribe had its own as did the Seneca... it was not a one size fits all and some of the tribes had more maternal based rules and some more paternal based rules of inheritance so to speak. But many tribes had very complex governmental structures. So yes they had rulers who could in the European mind translate into King or Princess. It may not be a literal one of one translation but most translations generally leave room for different interpretations.

Language is imprecise for native speakers (native means people born to the land they are in so Europeans speaking English, French, German are native speakers just as an Iroquois speaking the North Atlantic languages would be a native speaker) so let's not get hung up on language.

Every group of humans has some form of governmental structure. Some are more rules based, some more social based, some based on power and tyranny. All "Native Americans" were neither good nor bad just like all Europeans were neither good nor bad. We are all human and that means we are all a weird mixture of saint and sinner and will work like the devil to be "right" even if we are objectively wrong. That is called rationalization and has gotten humans in trouble for most of our history.

Fact: There were intermarriages among indigenous people and immigrating populations from all over the globe.

Possible fact: There are records in China and Europe and South America and California that allude to a voyage made by Asians from China (and the crews were likely mixed ethnicity) to the new world before Columbus got to the Caribbean in 1492.   There were also rumors of earlier voyages not proven. Scraps of maps, some artifacts found point to this as more of a maybe than a myth.

https://www.livescience.com/7002-map-fuels-debate-chinese-sail-world.html

Myth: Indigenous people were savages without traceable history. Oral traditions are amazingly handed down in many of these populations with accuracy that can be as reliable as some written histories.   http://dohistory.org/on_your_own/toolkit/oralHistory.html#ACCURACY

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My line supposedly by Pocahontas' niece, Nikitti, Martha Davis, Eliz. Venable,,,Mary Morton, to my mom is T2b2!. [closed]

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