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Bit of a unique pastime of mine is historical figure and celebrity genealogy. It can be tedious at times, depending on the individual, but I noticed an odd trend of folks outright falsifying their backgrounds, for whatever reason.
A notable more recent example is Charley Crockett, the country singer. Love his music and was really interested to research his supposed connection to Davy Crockett, as well as the Jewish, Creole, and African descent he's claimed for years.
However, upon building his entire tree, sources and all, I discovered the man has falsified his entire background. No connection to Davy Crockett and none of the ancestry he claimed to have.
I did this with a few other folks, one being an activist for Native tribes in the 70s. Discovered he was just a white dude cosplaying. No connection to any of the tribes he claimed and his family were all from the Northeast (and had been for 250 years), not the Southeast where those tribes were from.
Not a famous lie, but an interesting twist in the family's genealogy: My wife's family had a story that when their Fitzgerald ancestors tried to get off the boat in Boston, they were stopped at the gangplank and told that Boston already had "too many Irish."
That always seemed a little ridiculous to me, and after a few months of research, I'd not yet found from where her line originated. Then I managed to get my hands on a death certificate for a Fitzgerald in her family that had arrived in Illinois. On it was listed his parents' named. His parents were both born in Ireland, but both died in ...Quebec.
About a week later, I'd assembled proof of that family tree: Mother, father, 13 children. 2 of those children were born in Ireland, and the other 11 were born in the Megantic region, Quebec, Canada.
The ship they came in on? It made a stop in Boston before arriving in Canada.
Now, I still can't prove that the event happened, but I love that in my effort to prove it wrong I may have given the legend more support.
A lot of people just believe what their families tell them and have no idea that it is inaccurate. This can happen to famous people too.
In my paternal grandmother's Bible, it said that we had an ancestral line from the Mayflower. It supposedly had been in the previous Bible to this one. I have found several connections to the Jamestown colony, but no luck after years of searching with any kind of Mayflower connection.
Look for old New England blood lines. It really isn’t rare to have an ancestor from the Mayflower if you have colonial roots.
I have thoroughly searched my family tree, and I have found ancestors who were in fact in the Plymouth colony in the early 1600s. Sadly, so far none of them arrived on the Mayflower.
Searching my Massachusetts immigrant ancestors, did find one recent surprise. I am descended from Percival Lowell, who emigrated to the Boston area in the 1600s. He is the ancestor of the Boston Brahmin Lowells. This makes me a somewhat distant cousin of the Percival Lowell who discovered the planet/not planet Pluto
Nice connection to the Lowell Observatory. The actress Judy Dench discovered that she was related to the Danish astronomer Tycho Brae.
I wasn’t even looking for one and traced myself back to John and Pricilla Alden. No family lore, nothing whatsoever. No knowledge that we had this connection and it fell into my lap.
Have you tried a married in uncle/aunt? I found one of those! But no mayflower blood in my veins
I have a family line with the last name Odom. A huge chunk of this family, brothers and cousins, migrated southward together. The problem is, they used the same first names repeatedly, in succeeding generations. So, you had many cousins of various distances, all with the same name, with fathers of the same name.
One of these men married a woman with the surname Rogers. Her line of descent can be traced back to one John William Thomas Rogers, who migrated to Virginia in 1635. This is where my Odom line reaches an impasse, with the Rogers wife. I am not sure if this woman is one of my ancestors or not, because of the similar names confusion. But, I found two of her descendants in the 1900s claiming that they were descendants of the Rogers family who arrived on the Mayflower. This is incorrect. I suspect that this is where the story in my grandmother's Bible came from.
Like my ex mother in law insisting that she’s 1/4 Native American. My husband did a DNA test and nothing showed. Northern European across the board. She just insisted further it was a lie. Just because you have high cheekbones and straight dark hair doesn’t make you indigenous lady.
I believe it IS possible for your husband's mother to be 1/4 American Indian and for him to not inherit one single strand of it. That's discussed on Ancestry.com.
Interesting. I don’t believe this one (based on what I know of their family history and just that she’s a lair) but I do find that interesting information, curious how that works I’ll have to look into it. Thanks
Lol, dark hair and high cheekbones run in my family too. We couldn't be more Welsh/Irish Celts if we tried, according to our DNA. I'm whiter than most white people, it's boring.
Why do so many North Americans forget that the Irish and the Welsh have a large black-hair, brown-eyed, high cheekboned population, though? I have helped quite a few folks who stare at their pasty white DNA in shock and say stuff like "but I have black hair!" Yup, and my father-in-law can pass as Turkish when his DNA is like 40% Scandinavian and the rest pure Yorkshire, and his kids looked like extras from Village of the Damned until they hit their teens.
Hahahaha that is what they are 🤣🤣🤣 sorry idk why you cracked me up. They forget because they are so far removed often they think of what they stereotype it to be. The Irish Americans related to my extended family through marriage all have dark hair. Some light eyes but all very dark hair. I think it’s just her wanting to pretend to be connected to something many aren’t.
Glad I made you smile! My dad in law is the funniest since he really does look Arabic, but is genetically whiter than Hitler despite the suspicions of the border agents. My husband is getting darker as he gets older, and my sons both have a lovely gold tone to their skin, while I am either so pale I look dead or I'm the same shade as a boiled lobster. There is no inbetween.
I never did get the whole objectification of the "English Rose" complexion; we just look a bit sickly. I'd love to not be translucent in winter. Quite like my cheekbones, though.
Well, heh, it was information he would've known to be incorrect. The Crockett claim I can buy, but he explicitly described himself as a mixed race man....repeatedly..and claimed he was treated as a black man.
Do you have a source for this? I can’t find one. Feeling nosy.
Yes. I was thinking more about other people mentioned in the comments, not Crockett himself.
I'm Canadian, so Buffy Sainte-Marie is the most famous one for me. She claimed to be born on a reserve in Saskatchewan to Native American parents and then was adopted by a White family from the US and relocated to Massachusetts. She later said she was part of the "Sixties Scoop".
Turns out she was born to an Italian-American father and a mother of mostly English ancestry and birth records prove this. Her family has also since come forth to say she made up the entire story about her Native ancestry (and her family had been doing this since the early 1960s but she shut them up by issuing them a barrage of threats). Her dad changed their surname from the Italian Santamaria to the French-sounding Sainte-Marie due to rampant anti-Italian discrimination in the US at the time.
Honestly, with the benefit of hindsight, I always thought her story was fishy. While there were stories of Native kids being adopted by White families, those families had always been Canadian, from what I had heard. Also, she was way too old to have been a part of the Sixties Scoop.
Aboriginal ancestry can be a touchy subject in Canada, which is probably why media here did not make the huge deal about the story that it really should have received.
There's actually a great podcast by CBC called Finding Cleo, about a Cree girl taken during the Sixties Scoop and adopted by an American family. I don't know if this was common or not, from what I remember she was the only one of her siblings to be adopted in the US instead of Canada. Not that that has anything to do with Buffy Sainte-Marie's story, but it's a great podcast and I highly recommend it.
Connie Walker is an absolute treasure. All of her podcast series are fantastic
I discovered a half-sister through DNA matching. She’d only done the test to find out her ethnicity; as an adoptee in late 50s Manitoba she was worried she’d been a scoop baby.
Forgive my ignorance. What is a scoop baby?
More broadly, Indigenous children in Canada were being taken well before 1960 with government policies enforcing that more robustly from 1951 onwards, but the 60s Scoop refers to the time period in the below quote. The Millennium Scoop refers to Indigenous children put into the system from the 1980s until now.
"Between 1960s and the 1980s, the [Canadian government led] 'Sixties Scoop' removed First Nations, Métis and Inuit children from their homes, often without the consent, warning or even knowledge of the children’s families and communities [by child welfare authorities]. Children were adopted into predominantly non-Indigenous families, often out of province or out of the country and away from their languages, traditions and extended families. Parents and families were rarely notified about the locations of their children. Only after 1980, provincial child welfare workers informed Bands or communities of the location of children. Many families and children who were part of the Sixties Scoop are still searching for their relatives." Read more here.
Yep, good to see Canada join America in their horrific racism. Wonder if they forcefully sterilized the native women after taking the Kids like we did in America?
Holy crap. I had no idea.
I just watched a TikTok about this very thing. (I don’t know who the creator is, it just popped up on my FYP)
Hundreds of native kids were adopted by white Americans. Theres a newspaper ad floating around out there of them being sold by a priest I believe, for $25.00. Some years before the 60’s but definitely real.
I didn’t discover this personally of course, but perhaps the greatest genealogical con in American history is the ancestry of Jacqueline Kennedy Bouvier Onassis. Her grandfather self published a genealogy describing illustrious descent from French aristocrats, but the French immigrant ancestor was a cabinetmaker and married the daughter of a tobacconist/hairdresser. Mrs. Onassis’ mother, Janet Lee, was the granddaughter of four Irish potato famine refugees, but her family put forward the idea they were connected to important old southern families. In both cases, the families made fortunes quickly. Janet certainly knew the truth, Black Jack may not have. They had grown up with the privileges of wealth and the Bouviers were completely accepted in society. There were still some whispers about Janet, but not enough to keep them out of anything. So our revered First Lady had quite humble origins, and was more Irish than President Kennedy [she was not, in fact more Irish than the President, bit of myth sneaking in]. None of it changes her tremendous grace, intelligence, and beauty. A source
All 16 of JFK's great-great-grandparents were born in Ireland; one of his 64 4th-great-grandparents was born in England.
Being born in England didn't NOT make him Irish as many Irish went over for work. His blood made him Irish.
Paul McCartney is of Irish descent born in Liverpool. Liverpool full of Irish that came over. First stop off the ferry from Dublin.
Thank you for the correction!
Hilaria Baldwin lied about her Spanish heritage. Buffy St Marie lied about her indigenous Canadian heritage. Rachel Dolezal became famous after she lied about having African American heritage. Anna Leonowens who is the inspiration for The King and I musical lied about her heritage. She wasn't born in Caernarfon UK. She born in India and was Anglo-Indian heritage.
Ha, I was just wondering if I should mention Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas. Boston born and raised but she STILL puts on a “Spanish” accent.
She still leans into the lie! “How you say… cucumber?”
So it’s definitely a little more understandable to me why someone would lie about their heritage if they’re from a marginalized group, as your last example, and there’s a long history of this in Hollywood and otherwise. Discrimination is very real, and if you could “pass” and go around that discrimination, it would probably behoove you to lean into that.
Lying about being FROM a marginalized group, however, is sheer attention-seeking behavior.
How in the world do you know this‽ it’s fascinating.
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Is that sarcasm?! She literally lied and said her biological (white) family adopted her
Her whole backstory had been exposed as a lie.
Iron Eyes Cody, was a famous Native American actor that was popular between the 40's and 80's. In the mid 90s he was outed by his half sister as being full blood Italian.
Many of his movies were cancelled because of it. One of my favoritte 80s movies, Earnest Goes to Camp was pulled from shelves and hidden from the public by the studio to prevent any backlash that came from it. It was only recently made available again on streaming.
EARNEST P. WHIRL??!!????
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! 😭
Wow! I didn’t know this one!
I'm a descendant of Jefferson Davis, just not the one who was president of the confederate states. Rather, one of the other hundreds of Jeff Davises out there.
My aunt, who was into geneology long before me often boasted that one of our ancestors was buried at Westmintster Abbey. Years later when I was double checking her information as I built my own tree I discovered that a guy with the same name as our ancester is buried there. Ours guy was a sailor that died in a workhouse.
Andrew Johnson is my second great grandfather
And Andrew Jackson is mine.
Andrew Jackson's aunt is an ancestor of mine, in actuality. I'd prefer not to be related to the man.
She's the one who patched his wounds after he was slashed by the British soldier for refusing to shine his boots, per Jackson's own writings.
Rachel Donelson Jackson is my 2nd cousin 5x removed (her mother was a Stockley, from Accomack County, Virginia, and so was one of my 5th great-grandmothers).
Southerners with deep colonial roots back to 1600s/1700s Virginia/Maryland are probably slightly more likely to be related than not, though, in my experience; just doing descendancy tracing I've discovered I'm related by blood to a lot of unlikely people (Bill Clinton, Larry McMurtry, Tammy Wynette, Buck Owens, Ricky Nelson, Sam Walton, among others; the first three of those share a common ancestor with each other).
*Edit: further illustrating that Southerners with colonial ancestry are likely related, I'm also apparently related to Charley Crockett; his great-grandmother, Lillian Dillard, is a descendant of Martin Nalle of Essex County, Virginia (one of my 4th great-grandmothers was a Nalle, from the same line).
William Henry Harrison's uncle is one of my ancestors.
Jesse James is my fourth great grandfather.
That's interesting!
Other side of the coin-Jesse James robbed my great great grandparents at gun point, took the food they had canned for winter, all while on the run after the Northfield Bank robbery.
I didn't realize that he had living descendants.
There are some family and friends who believed that he didn't die when Ford shot him, but lived out a full life up north under an alias.
That is a lot of history to dig into. Super cool. Oh, side note... he didn't hurt my great great grandparents. He was actually polite (as polite as one can be while holding a gun) but told my family he would not hurt them as long as they helped and gave him some food.
I’m not a descendant of that Jesse James, thankfully. I was going with the theme of the thread. My 4x great-grandpa is a Jesse James, not the Jesse James. He’s actually not the only Jesse James in my tree. There are others but none of them are the Jesse James, either. There was family lore that we were related to him but I don’t think that’s true.
Now, on the other hand, on my mom’s side, I have family that may have known Jesse James, probably knew Cole Younger because they were neighbors and these relatives of mine were banished for a period of time for criminal acts. I don't know if I’ve got that exactly right, I need to refresh my memory, but it was a disappointing discovery.
Of course! I should have figured that out. Duh. Thanks for letting me know. LOL
I actually am a decent of THAT Jefferson Davis.
Yes, mine was William Clark. Mom insisted her grandmother told her it was the Lewis & Clark one, but I can’t find any connection there.
There have been a lot of 'pretendians' through the years. Gray Owl pretended to be part Apache when he was in fact an Englishman. Iron Eyes Cody, Buffy Saint Marie...
Then there are those who are just repeating what they've been told. They're not actively lying about it, they just didn't consider that maybe Grandma was just doing the same...as in repeating what she'd been told. Elvis Presley, Johnny Depp, and Cher would probably fall into this category...all claiming to be Cherokee when they're not.
When non-natives outnumber natives so much, it's just mathematics that a lot of claimed natives you meet are going to be fake (or just wrong). If even one in hundred non-native Americans falsely claim native heritage, that's 3 million fake natives...
Yep! An example of being wrong happened in my family. I was always told we were Cherokee and for years I believed it because I have some features that look indicative of Native American heritage if you know what to look for. I spent years digging into family tree and did DNA. Turned out it’s not Cherokee at all, but Seminole and Muskogee creek (specifically the Thomas Palmer band). But I did end up with a bonus surprise that none of us expected, I also had trace amounts of Bantu, Congo, and Melanesian in there. It confused us because other than the native heritage all our ancestors immigrated here after the civil war. I’m still doing digging because I have so many questions 😂
Sometimes the tests are saying there's a certain percentage chance that you have any amount at all, not necessarily saying you are x% of that ethnicity. So maybe there is a 2% chance you have some bantu but maybe those genes just are usually (but not exclusively) found in those people
It's there, because my paternal aunt and older relatives have higher percetnages of them in their results
Johnny Depp is an interesting case, actually. I’m something like 5th cousins once removed with him. And on top of that, we’re related via my maternal grandmother’s direct paternal line. Both of our lineages are from deep in Eastern Kentucky, going back to the founding of the State right after the Revolution.
I’ll just go ahead and put it like this- every male descendant on that line has a purely Sub-Saharan African paternal haplogroup. That boy is mixed with something, but it’s almost certainly African-American for one is what I’m getting at. In addition, as part of the Melungeon DNA Project on FTDNA, he is also as a descendant of a man with the surname Sizemore, who does test with an Indigenous haplogroup. So, in other words he’s got dashes of both African and indigenous going back several generations.
He is a Grinstead descendant, but this is from the 1600s. As for Sizemore, I didn't know about that, but it honestly doesn't surprise me. Known a few Appalachian friends with similar ancestries.
Both of my grandmothers are of Melungeon descent, albeit this was during a time when Melungeon did not refer to just the Vardy community. One grandmother's line is fully documented,the other only via DNA with little paper sources. There's a great resource for researching free African and Native ancestors called FreeAfricanAmericans.com or org.
In the case of my grandmother’s line, her mother’s side is the Melungeon side. I know she and my father told me growing up that they just identified as Indian/Cherokee, and I later on found articles where others in her home county had referred to them as “the Magoffin County Indians/Red People”. The knowledge of being a branch off of the same “core” Melungeon families down in Eastern Tennessee as you say had been lost by her generation, but it’s so blatantly obvious nowadays with digitized documents, when you see some of the same cluster of surnames like Collins, Nickels/Nichols, and Gib/pson.
I’m related to Johnny via her paternal Marshall side.
Which county in KY, if you don't mind? I have a lot of lineage there myself and have been recently looking into a line in Barren, Co., but there's also a lot going on for me in Bell and Harlan counties.
Magoffin County, which branched off of being part of Floyd County if you go back far enough.
http://www.historical-melungeons.com/mag_indians.html documents that line.
Thanks for satiating some of my "are we related?!" impulses that are way too common. I know I'm not the only one, but still...
My husband's family is from around there - Blackburn family mostly.
I second this question because one line of my family is from Kentucky and I do have some African and Native American traces. Mine was from around the breathitt areas -and maybe will find more once I finish digging in that line/branch.
I have a ton of family from Bell/Harlan area too.
The Melungeon thing is very interesting! I believe the admixture of peoples also includes Portuguese fisherman and Turks who worked on their boats coming ashore as early as the 1600s if not before?
Not really.
That was one of the older explanations/urban myths to explain our origin back in the day, but both paper genealogy as well as genetic in modern times doesn’t show evidence of this at all.
What the evidence does show is that the vast majority of us are mixed with Sub-Saharan African, with some people showing signs of indigenous mixture too- what we likely are are the descendants of some of the earliest free people of color, and maybe some of the Carolina native tribes who intermarried with whites and runaway slaves.
The explanations of being “Indian” (like in my own family) or “Portuguese” are likely rooted in trying to initially throw off the knowledge that we were mixed with African.
Johnny Depp's 8th grandmother was a freed African American woman, Elizabeth Grinstead
Johnny Depp is also a 5th cousin to Charles Manson, related through the Wells family
The legendary Jeanne Cooper who played Catherine Chancellor on the Young and the Restless. I read her memoir, where she discusses the racism her family experienced due to their Cherokee Ancestry, on both sides of her parent’s families. She also discussed it more in interviews about her memoir, here is a quote: “Nobody was full blooded, but Indian on both sides and full blooded as it steps up to their mothers and fathers. But, the treatment of being called “red niggers” was the same treatment as any black person had in the South.
My grandmother, proud as she was, said, “You can have your Indian land grants. This group is going west.””
So when I was reading it, something just didn’t sit right with me, so I researched her tree and low and behold, nothing but white people on all sides as far back as you can go. Her grandparents definitely lived around Cherokee territory, but they were all white. I even saw photos of some of them, and of those, no one would ever have mistaken them for Native and been racist towards them.
It’s a shame her son, actor Corbin Bersen, named his film production company “Team Cherokee Productions”.
Can’t disclose their name but I found a famous person among my 23&Me matches. I use “famous” somewhat loosely as someone who meets notoriety criteria sufficiently for a Wikipedia page. They thought their father was someone who it turns out wasn’t their biological father…their biological grandfather is my third great grandfather. I got in contact with them through their daughter and eventually was able to share my findings on a conference call. It was a lot of fun.
Oh wow! That’s pretty cool, but must’ve been an awkward conversation too. Can you tell us what kind of celebrity they are - musician, actor, etc.?
Author (Pulitzer Prize)
The Native American stuff is common among white Americans. They hear a family story about being descended from a “Cherokee Princess” (the classic and most funny example as the Cherokee didn’t have a concept of royalty or nobility). White Americans masquerading as Native American run the gamut (perhaps most famously in recent times being Elizabeth Warren) and unless they have documented tribal affiliation or have a well researched and sourced genealogy to someone listed on a tribal roll (Dawes Roll etc) in the vast majority of cases it’s bunk. That’s a tough pill for a lot of folks to swallow because they realize the natives have the better claim to the land and want to assuage their consciences with the belief they have a little native blood too.
A lot of people used to assume that my grandmother was part native because she was so dark when she tanned, but as far as anyone knew we were white all the way down.
I had my DNA tested last year, and lo and behold--Inuit. About 1%! (There is Spanish blood in that line, so that's probably where the dark tan and the dark eyes came from.)
It’s also very common among black Americans as well. Though I’m pretty sure there are more black Americans with actual native ancestry than white Americans but even among black Americans it’s still a small percentage of black people with native ancestry and most of the time it is also a family lure.
I usually give people the benefit of positive intent. That most people have no intention to defraud people. And you see it in this forum ALL the time. Family stories that turn out to not be true, either for heritage or for direct ancestors.
But once you're a public figure (even minor) or start using your ancestor to promote yourself, you have a responsibility to research that and to represent yourself accordingly. There's a huge difference between "I'm Native American" and "I have Native American ancestry" and "my family story says we have Native American ancestry but it hasn't been verified". And even the decision to make your heritage a huge part of your identity if you were never raised in the culture is something to consider.
For Charley Crockett, it appears from a few articles and comments that the direct descendant claim from Davy Crockett came from his grandfather (was in his obituary), possibly from earlier generations. But if Charley is using this as a promotional tool, he should have confirmed it. Easy to do. But he didn't. I don't have Ancestry anymore but I was quickly able to find his grandfather on Family Search and his Crockett line (as researched so far) doesn't link up to David (Davy), direct or indirect. Disappointed but not surprised. A few people have attempted to point this out in comments on articles but are then attacked for being haters and using his grandfather's obituary as a source. *sigh*
I wish more people learned from Elizabeth Warren, but I doubt anyone did.
Yeah Crockett a bit of a stab in the heart for me. Great music, so I couldn't help but be a bit interested in his ancestral claims. Went through the mans entire family tree, all sides, and all led to either WASP families or Volga Germans from Saratov. No relation to Davy and his family wasn't even in the same region.
There is an actor who is supposedly descended from a Russian royal house, but it turns out that his grandfather was English and changed his name in the 1950s. The grandfather took it upon himself to use the titles Prince and Princess for his family, as evidenced in a number of newspaper notices (birth/wedding/death). I was intrigued and have started a tree for the grandfather and so far his ancestry is English back to at least the mid-1700s!
To be fair, I don't believe that the actor has ever made the claim for himself, he identifies more with his mother's Mediterranean heritage.
I didn't do the work, but once spoke with the genealogist who disproved Elizabeth Warren's family claim of being Cherokee.