DNA

 My brother took an Ancestry DNA test.  The results are....  interesting.  

Our paternal grandparents were barely removed from the Old Country  (Germany in his case, Ireland in hers).  The majority of my brother's DNA is "Northern Europe".  "Germanic Europe" was a single digit percentage.  Knowing what I do about both DNA and history, I figure our Germans descended from invaders. Celts or Vikings are my best guess.  

Our maternal ancestors have been in this country much longer, so there's lots of cross-pollination potential.  The lines I've traced across the sea almost always go to Germany or Ireland, but so many generations in the Great American Melting Pot make them unpredictable.  

The Parkers having native heritage is one bit of family lore I've yet to prove or disprove, but anyone who has seen my mother or her father sees it.  I hoped my brother's results would help with that, but nothing has come of it so far.  

The way DNA mixes and sometimes gets lost in the shuffle, one of my other siblings could be bearing the genes we expected.  I'm just annoyed he didn't immediately match some Parker relative who knows all about *Great-grandpa the Indian Princess*!  

So far, I've had about a 50% success in proving family lore.  Some are disproven, some are proven, most are half-truths, and one or two linger in Limbo.  But a lot of my Parker lines stop at paywalls or simply peter out.  A lot of natives passed as something else to avoid The Removal.  A lot of births, adoptions, and marriages went undocumented.  

Maybe it's an amazing coincidence that everyone who looks at a picture of my mother asks if she was American Indian.  Scientists use physical traits to identify the racial identity of a skeleton, and most of us have some of those traits.  Logically, it doesn't fit to think my ancestors were lying or mistaken.  

This mystery ancestor is so far back the line, there's no way we qualify for any tribal membership.  Ultimately, it really doesn't matter to the big picture.  I just hate unanswered questions.  It doesn't matter if that one fellow died in a logging accident, either, but I want to know!  

Everything I find about how to research this tells me to start with the tribe.  One of my siblings believes we come from Miami stock, another Shawnee.  Both are indigenous to my area.  Both make sense.  My mother even went to far as to investigate a link to Quanah Parker of the Comanches.  Some of these Parker lines came from Virginia - maybe I'm one of the bazillion descendants of Pocahontas.   

It's quite maddening.  Like a Rubik's Cube.  

*Stole that bit from a book called How To Talk Trash in Cherokee.