AncestryDNA | Why Is My Native American Ancestry Not Showing Up? | Ancestry

hi everyone Krista came here with another episode of the barefoot genealogist today we are talking about ancestry DNA specifically we are talking about the number one question that we get asked about ancestry DNA which is where is my Native American ethnicity a lot of us myself included have stories in our family history about a great grandparent or a great great grandparent who was supposedly a full-blooded Native American interestingly enough so many of us have this story in our family history that it's taken on mythological proportions and if my perceptions are correct if all of us who claimed Native American ancestry really were Native American what we would find is that probably about half the United States would have Native American ancestry now I'm not saying that's not true I'm just saying that the it's it's not true as often as we might think it is so in my own family we had this persistent story about Native American ancestry specifically that my maternal grandfather was Native American either 1/4 or 1/8 Native American it was always kind of a fuzzy story he looked very Native American black hair dark brown eyes high cheekbones olive skin and he was from Arkansas the Arkansas Oklahoma border and lived in areas that used to be considered Indian Territory so this persistent myth occurred in my own family well I've had my mother has been DNA tested two of her sisters and two of her first cousins on her paternal side of the family all have been tested now that's five individuals and not one of them shows any Native American ethnicity and so of course that's the question that they're all asking well what happened to our Native American ethnicity and I've had to explain to them how DNA inheritance works and maybe some facts about family history that they're not too thrilled about so that's what I'm going to share you today and hopefully for those of you who are questioning this it'll make sense and either put to rest those myths or give you further avenues for research to be able to prove them true so let's go ahead and dive in basically when you have this myth or the story I don't want to call it a myth because it's not in every case the story in your family history that you have Native American and it does not show up in your DNA ethnicity report there's basically two options here either it is too far back in your family history to detect meaning you did not inherit that portion of DNA from that particular ancestor who was Native American because it wasn't really your great-grandmother who was Native American it was her great-great-great grandmother or none of your ancestors were Native American so let's focus on that first possibility first because it is very possible that those of you who have stories of Native American ancestry myself included and really do have Native American ancestry it's just further back than you thought it was so let's talk about how DNA is inherited so that you have a basic understanding of how that works you get 50% of your DNA from your father and 50% of your DNA from your mother your parents each inherited 50% of their DNA from each of their parents who inherited 50% of their DNA from their parents but here's the thing that people who are new to DNA might not understand and that is when we say that you inherit 50% of your DNA from your father and 50% of your DNA from your mother that does not mean that you get an even 50% split of everything that they have what it means is that you get a random 50% of their genetics and let me just use a simple example to explain this now this is super simplified but for those of you who are still trying to wrap your head around this concept I want to make sure that you understand let's imagine for example that your father is 100% Italian and that your mother is 50% British and 50% Western European okay so you're going to get 50% of your DNA from each parent well your if your father is a hundred percent Italian that means that you are going to be 50% Italian that's easy math if your mother is 50% British and 50% Western European that does not mean necessarily that you are going to be 25% British and 25% Western European she could for example give you all of her British DNA and none of her Western European DNA so you got 50% of her DNA but not an even 50% split now to take this a step further if you have a sibling your mother could pass on an entirely different combination to that sibling so even though you are full siblings full siblings only share about half of their DNA because they get half from each parent but it's not necessarily the same 50% that you received so you might get the 50% of great British and your sister might get the 50% of Western European and so you still have 50% of your DNA in common because you both are still 50% Italian from your father okay hopefully that makes sense let me use one more analogy that might resonate with some of you imagine you have a deck of cards okay a deck of cards has 52 cards in it and you're going to get half of those cards so we're going to shuffle those cards we're going to deal out 26 of those cards to you and that is what you receive half okay then we're going to reshuffle that entire deck of 52 cards and we're going to deal out another 26 cards to your sister and then we're going to reshuffle that deck and we're going to deal out another 26 cards to your brother now if we were to take a snapshot of each of those deals what we would discover is that about in almost every case about half of those cards or about 13 of those cards are going to have in common with your brother and with your sister but they are going to get cards you didn't get and you're going to get cards they didn't get hopefully those two analogies between those two analogies this concept of inheritance makes a little bit more sense what it means is that you are not inheriting everything your parents are or have in their DNA you're only inheriting half of it and so what does that mean for Native American ancestry well if you have a grandparent or a great grandparent who is 100% Native American then chances are you've received some of that Native American DNA and in the ancestry database here where we have more than a million people who have taken the DNA test and received their results we're seeing a lot of people with Native American ancestry so it is showing up where it exists the problem is like in my case most of us the story is really unclear right so in my case I was told it was my grandfather who was Native American but then as I became more aware as an adult and started asking more questions specifically genealogical questions it came out that well no maybe it was his grandmother or her mother who was the full-blooded Native American and maybe it was even her mother who was the full-blooded Native American and the reality is that particularly here in the United States to have anybody as a full full-blooded anything is really really rare even if my Native American ancestor was just two or three generations ago chances are two or three generations before them somebody intermarried or parented a child with with a European and so the grandmother that we may think is a hundred percent Native American may really only be 25% Native American or 50% Native American so there's a lot of a lot of variability in the family history and in the biology of it but let's just use this particular example let's say that it is your fourth great grandparent who is actually a 100% Native American well they pass on 50% of their DNA to their child and 50% of that DNA gets passed on to their child and 50% of that DNA gets passed on to their child and so on and so on and so on until we get down to you and you have just this tiny little trace less than 2% this tiny little trace of Native American DNA and so it could be that it's just too small to detect that amount of DNA or as we mentioned before it could just be that the inheritance of it is random enough that you didn't get that small piece but maybe your sister did or your brother did or one of your first cousins did and so one of the ways to prove Native American ancestry if you do not show any in your DNA is to have other family members tested so you might have a sibling who received that portion if you have parents or grandparents tested absolutely get them tested any living absolutely get them tested anybody in that oldest generation that's still living you want to have tested and don't just think Lynnea Lee back to your parents and grandparents do your parents have any living siblings do your grandparents have any living siblings and then come down the line do your parents have any living first cousins right do they have any living children anybody in that branch of the family within one or two generations if you have them tested and if there was a Native American ancestor recently enough somebody is going to show up with that DNA so as I mentioned in my family I had we have tested my mother her two sisters and two of her first cousins we do have an intention to test other first cousins but at this point we are fairly convinced that either a it is too far back to detect which means there is nobody in an older living generation left to test that would that would give us the answer or the definitive answer about whether or not we have Native American DNA or we have to come to the realization that none of our ancestors were Native American and so that leads me to do more research so let me just talk briefly about some of the research you can do I've actually done a couple of videos on Native American ancestry so you can find them on the ancestry YouTube channel and I don't want to regurgitate or duplicate a lot of that information but I do just want to make a couple of notes here the first one is just because your family lived or was born in Indian that territory does not mean that they were Native American that's I think how a lot of these family stories my own included got started Indian Territory was what we for the most part was what we now recognize is the state of Oklahoma Oklahoma did not become a state until 1907 and so anybody born in that area prior to that time it was officially known as Indian Territory with different areas being assigned to different tribes but there were a lot of white people who lived and worked on farms and in the oil fields in those areas prior to 1907 and so you might have family members who were born in Indian Territory and that story somehow gets changed or misunderstood within just a generation or two as well we have an Indian ancestor so look and see was somebody born in Indian Territory could that be where that story started another way that a lot of Native American family stories get started have to do with appearances people say oh well you know she had black hair and high cheekbones and olive skin and so therefore she must have been Native American or she looked Native American and one of the problems with that is that there are a lot of different ethnicities who have similar features a lot of Mediterranean people some some Europeans who intermarried with African Americans end up with some of those characteristics lots of different ways that those appearances could show up now in my family we actually have a photo of one my grandfather's great aunts I believe who was dressed in full Indian regalia and that was somehow passed around as proof that well we must be Native Americans somewhere in this family well come to find out she had actually gone to a fair and at the fair they had had one of those photo booths where you could you know pick a costume and you know be it you could be a cowboy you could be an Indian you know you could dress up in old-timey clothes right and and she had had her photo taken at the fair in a costume and then had sent that copies of that photo out to different family members that had then been passed down generation to generation and somehow that ended up as a family legend or myth that we were Native American cracks me up every time I think about you know if she is somewhere you know if there is another side and she is watching us um then I have to wonder if she just is giggling at the joke that she somehow managed to play on generations of our family because of a single photo that she decided to take in a moment of frivolity for her so lots of different ways that that Native American story gets started now with that said there are still Native American ancestors that can be found a lot of records exist as a matter of fact ancestry just did a huge launch of Native American records with the Oklahoma Historical Society last November and you can find those on the ancestry website most notably of those are the Dawes rolls for the Five Civilized tribes that is what they were called at the time those Dawes rolls people had to prove a Native American ancestry or connection to Native Americans in order to be included on the roll so again you need to be a little bit careful just because somebody is included on the Dawes rolls does not mean they were Native American for example I was doing research for a family who was convinced of their Native American ancestry sure enough their great-great great-grandfather was listed on the Dawes rolls he was listed there however because his second wife was Native America and his first wife from whom they descended was not so he was white his first wife was white all of their children were white his second wife was Native American and they had two children and so he was included on the Dawes rolls with her and with their children but this other part of the family was not even though some of the children were raised by this native-american stepmother they were not Native American so so white people do get included on those records so you do have to pay attention to the details of those records but the Dawes rolls are an excellent place to start if you have particular stories about your family being from one of those Five Civilized tribes now the other thing you have to be really careful of is make sure that the story about your Native American ancestry matches a specific time and place the Native American tribes and there are thousands of them recognized by the federal government the Native American tribes have lived in very specific places at very specific times in the history of the other recorded history of this nation and in the colonial period and so if you have Native American ancestors you know if you're claiming that you have a Pawnee ancestry or Cherokee ancestry or Sioux ancestry make sure that you understand where those tribes lived at specific periods of time because if your ancestor who was supposedly from that tribe was nowhere near that time in place then chances are even got the tribe wrong which makes a difference in your research or the story has has somehow come to you without all the facts so hopefully that is enough information to help some of you understand why you're why you may not have inherited Native American DNA or why you might not have it at all anywhere in your family if you have additional questions and you're watching this live I will be on chat in just a few minutes to answer those questions if you are watching this archived video on our YouTube channel please feel free to leave comments we will monitor those and reply as necessary also we're getting ready again to publish a new monthly calendar of topics for our livestream videos so if you have suggestions for topics you'd like to see covered in future videos you can email me at ask at ancestry.com just drop in the subject line of that email live stream or barefoot genealogist topic suggestions so that I know that that's what that is and then be sure sometime in the next week or so to check the ancestry Facebook page click on that events tab you'll see the topics for September you'll be able to RSVP to the events that you're interested in are the video topics that you're interested in and then you'll get some Facebook reminders when those videos are coming up to watch live or when they've been archived so you can watch them on YouTube well that's all I have prepared for you today until next time have fun climbing your family tree

Channel: Ancestry

Views: 684,285

Rating: 4.6740432 out of 5

Keywords: ancestry.com, ancestry, family tree, family history, genealogy, Barefoot Genealogist, Native American, American Indian, DNA, AncestryDNA, autosomal DNA, ethnicity

Id: geE7zsehccY

Length: 18min 50sec (1130 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2015