Tracing your ancestral history.
All my married life, I have heard about my wife’s Native American roots, that she has a Ojibwe native in her family tree. My wife is a California hippie, blue eyes, blond hair, furthest from a Native American that you could imagine. Every once in a while, she would find more information, then later on she would dig, and find more. What she found out first was as a child, her grand mother told her the “shameful” story of her ancestor, Barbara, an Indian woman who was kidnapped by her German immigrant ancestor up in Michigan sometime in the early 1800s, and taken as his wife. The shame mentioned by her grandmother was not the kidnapping of Barbara, but that Indian blood was now running through her veins. That was the attitude of Americans up til the 1980s. That is the only native blood in her line, so it is pretty small. But she identifies with it, and is proud of it. It grounds her more to this country than just being a 17th generation born in America, starting from the first ancestor who came on the Mayflower.
