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WONALANCET
SANDWICH, NEW HAMPSHIRE |
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| 18TH CENTURY ILLUSTRATION OF ALGONQUIAN PEOPLE |
Short Answer, as of 2016: No, this family link does not have Indian roots, after running DNA tests. My family story of being linked to Indians is nothing more than fiction, and a very common story among most White American families.
Long Answer below, with all research...
This blogpost is a place for my research on the rumored Indian ancestry in my family, coming through my maternal grandmother,
Emily Temm-Clarke, and my theory at one time that it might lie with my grandma Emily's maternal great grandmother,
Sally Elliot-Morrill, born to
Benjamin Elliot and Susannah Drew of Sandwich, New Hampshire in 1805, wife of
Jonathan Smythe Morrill of Tuftonboro, and later of Portland Maine.
Jonathan and Sally are the forefathers of a large number of Greater Portland Morrills.
As mentioned
in an earlier post, if you ask any White American about his ancestry, they will most definitely tell you that they are "part Native American". I've had fun with these people, trying to get proof for their claims, but the best that most can offer is that Grandma told them there was a "Cherokee Indian Princess" in there somewhere. Occasionally someone offers up some DNA proof, and I've even helped some people find verifiable links to Indian census rolls . It can happen, of course, but not nearly as much as we might wish.
The story I always heard in my family while growing up was that
somewhere on Grandma Emily's side of the family, we are from the
"Blackfoot Tribe". As a child, it sounded interesting enough to me. As a moody teenager searching for validation, I
began to adopt the idea as fact, and believed myself to
be special in some way, given that I already had been told that my dad's
side of the family had
Mayflower
roots (a rumor I was able to prove true - many times over - with a lot of help from
cousins, and digging through many old records). As a teenager, though, I found it
fascinating to imagine myself as descending both from native people and from those who colonized.
At some point after I began
college in NYC, I was at the public library, where I was approached by a
very obvious looking American Indian, who told me that I appeared to
have some measure of Indian features, and that I should join the
YMCA Thunderbirds, who could supposedly help me determine the truth of it
all...with the ultimate goal of my being able to apply for government
scholarships for college, since American Indians can apply for grants
for that purpose, of course depending on how much native blood you can
prove to posess.
I never took the kind man up on his
offer, and my own independent research later led me to learn that
Blackfoot Nation is located in Montana. Was some ancestor of mine from
Montana? Did they later 'drift' to New England?? Was there even a
connection? Or, more likely, was this all an exotic story that had been passed down
many generations? I didn't know or care enough at the time to pursue it
further. However, while still in college, in one last ditch effort to
try and secure government cash for my schooling, I went to my 86 year old
Grandma Emily, and asked her, "Hey Gram, what tribe of Indian are we anyway?"
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EMILY TEMM-CLARKE
HOLDING BABY ME (1970) |
"INDIAN?? I ain't no GAWWWD damned Indian!!" was her reply...and that was that!
Now, this
is quite contrary to what she had supposedly told my mother growing up.
So, blame it on a bit of senility, or exaggerated family folklore, but I
was still left to sit on that for several years, until it became a pet
project of mine as a family researcher.
Many have
looked at the picture above and have said "How can she deny being part
Indian?" Those tough features, high cheekbones and all...but the woman
above was born to parents who were deemed "WHITE" on all available
records. Her father,
John Henry Temm, was half German, half Scottish, and I have records backing that up.
Her mother,
Hattie Morgan Temm,
was, as far as I could tell from my research, purely of English/Welsh
stock. However, she does appear quite dark in the below
sepia-tone photo, but that could be easily blamed on photography:
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| HATTIE MORGAN-TEMM |
Hattie's father,
William Sanford Morgan, looks
white (and is clearly the source of my gramma's high cheekbones). He is proven to be of English and Welsh blood by many dozens of
available records:
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| WILLIAM SANFORD MORGAN |
Hattie's mother (and William's spouse),
Emily Morrill, daughter to Sally Elliot, looks white too...but perhaps there's a small amount of something else there?
Hattie's
sister, Adelaide Morgan-Simpson, also looks white, but carries that
same 'big rough face and high cheekbones' as the other ladies:
Adelaide's
only child, Emily Simpson-Pease, actually looks kind of dark (but
perhaps it's also the tone of the photo?), when HER father was white and of
direct British descent:
I
had my mother do a maternal DNA (mtDNA) test. This would serve to show
a link to ancient racial migration patterns, but only to her direct
maternal line...which would include all the ladies pictured above.
Her group came up as "
Haplogroup X2b4".
Now, A, B, C, D, and some of X are all associated with migratory Siberian Asian
people that settled in the Americas as the first, "Native
Americans"...for lack of a better term. But some women in Haplogroup X are also linked to European people, so much research had to be done to create the above group X2b4, to narrow this down (this occurred in 2015).
Now, the Ossipee Nation (one of the 12 tribes of
Algonquian/Eastern Abenaki Indians) was located on
Lake Winnepesaukee tributary known as the
Melvin River. My thought was that Sally may have been associated with this tribe, given the proximity. A poem by John Greenleaf Whittier describes the famous
Indian Grave by the Lake where they found the bones of a seven foot Indian and placed a memorial stone.
I've been satisfied, though, with the DNA research above, completed in 2015, that there is most definitely no Native American blood in my family. Looks like my Grandma Emily was correct after all. She wasn't no "GAWWWD Damned Indian".
