@earthling1

My experience follows, and please note that this only applies to me. This is not intended to cast aspersions on anyone else's family history...

My maternal grandfather was widely believed to be a full-blooded Cherokee: he was a retired Marine who enlisted on Dec 8th at age 38, and got himself well and truly shot up on Guam. He regaled us all with stories of his Indian heritage, and even taught me a few words of Cherokee, lots of lore, and how to noodle for fish and witch wells, among other things. And to her dying day my mother believed every word of it, she of the high cheekbones and straight black hair.

Unfortunately, both his mother and his father turn out to have been very, *very* Irish. There were no recorded intermarriages with anyone of Native American extraction, right back to the arrival of both his maternal and paternal lines in the New World. And having done the genealogical research to confirm this, I then got to break the news to the remaining folks in the family. It did not go over well- but they have now repeated the work, and understand that they were gaslit for their whole lives, just as I had been.

A friend who is a professor of US History specializing in the Civil War and Reconstruction, at one of our colleges here in CO, tells me that this fabrication was actually a very common thing in the reconstruction South where I grew up- my original home was one of 3 houses in my town that weren't burned by Sherman's troops on his march to the sea. As he tells it, many folks came to claim Cherokee ancestry simply to avoid being called racists. So for all I know, he himself might have been gaslit as well- nobody alive today ever met *his* parents.

That hurt. I suppose that a real giveaway should have been that my graddad was also a muckey-muck in the local Klan, which was a real force in that area that had been so totally ravaged at the end of the war. Since those folks are known to hate *everybody*, an actual in-the-flesh native American should have received a certain amount of pushback as they rose through the ranks. But then, so would somebody who was mostly of Irish extraction. So there are many mysteries here, none of which will ever be resolved at this point. That is a compost pile in which I do not care to further dig.

However, I can still witch wells- so I suppose that that makes it all better. (;-) Your mileage will almost certainly vary...

#2.2
who lived her whole life in the same cabin in West Virginia's Appalachian mountains told me she was half Cherokee. And she had all the features of Indian heritage, which followed in my Father.
My Ancestry.com readout showed no Indian blood also, which causes me to question the accuracy of its results.
I do recall a note that came with it that only large DNA "patches" were observable. They did offer more expensive tests that were more discerning.
You could still have Indian blood, but highly diluted.
A defining characteristic of Native American blood is the love of Mother Earth.
If you have that, run with it and call it good.
IMHO