Christian Waddington (unknown) - Relationship to Ka Okee cut?

Christian was born around 1636. I don't know how many Scottish colonists were around at the time, but there was certainly no barrier to them coming over. The Stuart dynasty united the thrones of England and Scotland in 1603, and the English civil war hadn't broken out yet. "She may have been Scottish" is a more plausible explanation for Christian's name than the descent claims that are being made for her.

Some of those 57 hits don't refer to a woman's name, but most of them do. A good percentage of them are Scottish, but there are also plenty that are English, and are scattered all over the country. So the name wasn't completely unknown there.

Changing subjects, I noticed this line in one of Deyo's articles: " It is important to note that the famous Matoaka portrait of Pocahontas was found in England in a Pettus home!" That seems like it could be significant, but I can't verify it. First of all, Google doesn't recognize the term "Mataoka portrait", so I'm not sure what Deyo means.

Apparently there are only four significant portraits. There's a 1616 engraving by Simon van de Passe that's believed to be the only image taken from life. It was created for a book, not for hanging on walls. Engravings have their limitations, and it's not a flattering picture. There's another engraving that's a slightly prettied-up version of the first one, and the Booton Hall portrait which is an oil-painting version of the engravings, enhanced to make it look more lifelike. All three have an oval "frame" around the portrait that mentions Mataoka.

Booton Hall belongs to the Elwin family, which is related to the Rolfes. There are some claims of Elwins being descended from John Rolfe and Pocahontas, although this seems to be disputed.

Finally there is the Sedgeford portrait, which is in a very different style than the others. It was purchased by a member of the Rolfe family in the belief that it was Pocahontas, but it's now believed to be the wife and child of Seminole chief Osceola. I can't find any sign of a portrait that belonged to the Pettus family.

There is no actual evidence that Wahanganoche was the man baptized by Father Andrew White. This is the quote from Father Andrew White, a Catholic priest who arrived with Calvert in 1634 on the Ark and the Dove, who also baptized Kittamaquund, chieftain of the local Piscataway Indians, and his wife and daughters. in 1640. Father White spent several weeks with the Potomac Indians in the winter of 1641-2. In his annual letter to his superiors for 1642 he wrote: “During a detention of nine weeks at Potomac town, his spiritual gain in souls fully compensated for the delay. For, during that time, there was an accession to the church, of the chief of the town, with the principal inhabitants. Also a chief of another tribe, with many of his followers; a third, with his wife, son and one of his people, and a fourth chieftain, with a companion of high rank among his own people. “ (translated letter can be found in Maryland Archives online)

Thanks, I thought it seemed a little odd that Wahanganoche would convert. But on the other hand, I've read that the Patawomeck were semi-independent of the Powhatan confederacy, and were friendlier with the English than the other tribes. So if a chief did convert, he'd be a good candidate to be the one. But on the third hand, White was Catholic (Jesuit). Virginia was Protestant country, and Catholicism had been in bad odor in England ever since Henry VIII broke with the Church. If Wahanganoche was going to convert, going Catholic was a bad political move if he wanted to stay friendly with his English neighbors. Furthermore Wahanganoche was born around 1615 and had been dealing with the English his whole life. Why would he decide to convert around 1641 when he hadn't done it earlier?

I'm not sure what White means by Potomac town. White is primarily associated with the settlement of Maryland, not Virginia. This link tells his story: https://mdroots.thinkport.org/library/andrewwhite.asp His most famous achievement was converting a Piscataway chief. He talks about converting four chiefs during his time at Potomac town. How many chiefs could there be in the region? He might mean heads of families rather than chiefs of an entire tribe.

Every little “town” had a head man, but they all got called “chiefs” by the English. Wahanganoche may well have been one of White’s converts but there is absolutely no way to know.

He might not have known that Catholic wasn't cool. The scholarly article at https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5814&co... says that the English didn't want the Indians to find out about their internal divisions, and tried to present a united front. It's thought that the 1644 uprising may have been influenced by somebody letting it slip that there was a civil war in England, and there was some related skirmishing in the area that the Indians could see for themselves.

It also says that Christianizing the Indians was a major goal in the early days of the colony, and the English were hugely frustrated by their lack of success. The Pocahontas-Rolfe marriage was a big deal in part because it showed that it could be done. Henry VIII threw the priest/monk system out the window, so the English didn't have an organization of missionary priests working for them. It's possible that they may have more or less given up by the 1640s. But they did try, at least in the beginning.

White's work in the Americas came to an end in 1644 after a Protestant attack on St Mary's City that targeted Catholics. But that hadn't happened yet at the time of the conversion story.

I think we might be reaching the part of the conversation now where we run out of things to say. If that's the case, I want to say that I'm even less convinced now than I was before. The social barriers to intermarriage were a lot greater than I realized.The Pocahontas-Rolfe marriage was an exceptional one-off political event that temporarily brought peace, but the 1622 uprising put a final end to that sort of thing. I don't think that Thomas Pettus could have risen to a position on the Governor's Council if he committed the social-death act of marrying an Indian woman, and on top of that was living 80 miles away from Jamestown. I didn't know that the maiden names of Anne Meese and Christian Pettus were actually unknown, or that there are major timeline problems with some of the key figures. I didn't have a lot of confidence in the DNA project to begin with, and now it looks like it's on a much smaller scale than I expected. It's a nice story, but we need much better evidence than what we've got right now for me to start believing it.

P.S. I was looking through some of the early posts from 2019 and found this statement: "the X or the 23 stores up alleles and is called the sticky gene. The genetic term is ativism. It downloads generations later and can store it up for 1000 years."

I think there is some confusion here. Google for X-chromosome ativism and you get nothing. It doesn't seem to be an accepted scientific concept Google for X-chromosome inactivation and you'll get an explanation of how in females, one gene in each pair on the X randomly switches "off" so that X-chromosome expression is balanced in males and females. Males have only one X and it is fully active. Females have two X's, but in terms of functionality it's like they have only one because half the genes have been switched off.

The X doesn't "store up alleles" any differently than the rest of the chromosomes do. It just has a different inheritance pattern than the other chromosomes. "Sticky" DNA refers to DNA segments that have persisted in a lineage for longer than average. You need to find some sticky segments if you want to prove descent from 10 generations ago using atDNA, but stickiness is a matter of random probability.

X-DNA does tend to be more sticky than autosomal because of its inheritance pattern. Women can recombine their X DNA like any other chromosome pair because they have two X's. But men have only one X that they can't recombine. The X that a man gives to his daughter is exactly the same as the X that he received from his mother, assuming that there haven't been any random mutations. So the X DNA is NOT being recombined in both parents in every single generation. For tracing a line of descent from a specific ancestor, you tend to get the greatest stickiness when each generation alternates between males and females, and the least stickiness when there's a long string of consecutive females. If there are two consecutive males, the chain of X descent is broken because a male does not give an X chromosome to his son.

Erica Howton you're getting mysterious Scandinavian percentages in your ethnicity estimates because making these estimates is a most inexact science. It's quite good at the continental level (for example telling the difference between European, African, and/or Asian), but breaking down the results within the continent is a lot more of a crapshoot. Each different company has their own algorithm, so you get different results from different companies. The Vikings had a lot of influence in Britain and a few other places, which makes the ethnicity estimate go haywire for some companies. FTDNA thinks I'm 29% Scandinavian, Ancestry thinks it 6%, and 23andMe and MyHeritage think it's zero. The correct answer is zero or something very close to it - my last Scandinavian ancestor was a sixth great grandmother. I actually have identified a 13cM segment that apparently have come from her, but that's like a quarter of a percent.

The paper trail says that I should be roughly 60% British Isles, 40% German, and precious little of anything else. The ethnicity estimates range from 82% British and 12% German to 25% British and 68% German, with some other random crap thrown in for fun. My favorite is the 0.3% Coptic Egyptian that 23andMe came up with. So don't take the ethnicity estimate too seriously. The bigger percents are probably somewhere in the general ballpark, although some items might not be described in the way you'd expect. Items under 2% are likely to be junk. Some companies are giving me a few percents of Eastern European, which is probably mislabeled eastern Germany.

In reply to your comment about the 2019 23rd Chrome description, it was a quote by the professional genetic genealogist who does this type of work, every day, for a living for the company DNA Detectives (who work to find criminals and do based on the type of atDna work we mirror treed, just like they do). I am not calling that person a liar nor any of the many Bryant/Martin/Fugate/Elkins who carry the DNA Genetic Testing & Analysis - 23andMe
who are in connections both on atDna work in concert with each other along with the Sullivan descendants all of who have been keeping track of their BRCA 1 and 2 mutation rates in research banks. There is no reasonable doubt that these families oral histories that jive with the land deed granting is not exactly how the Patawomeck and the Mattapony have consistently laid it out in public website that you linked. To clear up one item about the review of what was reported as only 9 participant kits in our studies, that is not at all the case. As explained earlier, it 's these families lines ferreted for who has multiple lines back, tracking where their cM increase to do the endogamy and run against paper trailed Rolfe / Matoaka BRCA 1 /2 and 25 variant affected claimants. It is absolutely ferreted out for all the by various Bryans and Bryants and it was run against the 10,000 setting choice on TIER 1 on the isolated segments signatured in various lines back to gen 10 for Wahunseneca claimants and then categorized for there the cancer mutation which comes through Bryant mother's affects these claimants. The summation is the Patawomeck and Matapony elders were right.

Experts aren't always right and they don't always express themselves clearly even when they are right. Atavism refers to the reappearance of a trait that was lost during evolution - millions of years ago, not a few generations ago: https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/atavism-embryology-develo... When a trait reappears after just a few generations, it's usually because a recessive gene was quietly traveling down the line until it met another one of its kind. We're just starting to learn about gene expression, but it appears that environmental factors can play a role in how strongly a gene expresses itself or whether it gets expressed at all. But gene expression is a separate issue. We're looking at whether the DNA is there, not at what it does.

Atavism is a fascinating subject actually, but not relevant to what we're doing here. Parrot color mutations are one of my interests, and I think that the pearl mutation in cockatiels may be a reversion to ancestral coloring. I have an article section about it at http://www.littlefeatheredbuddies.com/info/breed-coloration2.html#o... if anybody wants to read it for the sheer geekery of it, followed by speculation on the possibility of getting green cockatoos through another such reversion. What's interesting is that scientists say that color patterns on feathers are not encoded in the DNA, but result from "interaction between a DNA-encoded cellular property and physical-chemical principles". The science is over my head so I don't fully understand it. The general gist of it seems to be that these evolution-scale reversions are more due to biochemistry than to DNA.It's not relevant for genetic genealogy, since nobody can trace their ancestors back that far.

BRCA 1 and 2 are breast cancer genes, so they're being studied intensely for health purposes. But genetic genealogy is all about DNA sequences - the actual function of the DNA is irrelevant, and genes aren't normally mentioned at all in the context of genealogy.

My experience with Gedmatch is that only a tiny fraction of the people there have bothered to upload a family tree. You can compare your DNA segments to thousands of people on the Tier 1 tools, but there's not going to be much triangulation going on because an accurate family tree is needed for that and most people haven't posted one. Without a family tree it's just DNA matches, not triangulation. You can't be sure how you relate to these people. I tried using it to find more matches on my father's side of the family, but I couldn't actually identify how any of them were related to me. I did know that they were paternal matches, because I was using phased DNA. But that's all that I knew.

Trying to triangulate with the Rolfe line has all the pitfalls we talked about earlier. You can't do Y or mitochondrial because one line is male and one is female. Autosomal is very iffy after 400 years because the segments are so small. The probability of false matches is high, if it's a pileup region then you can't tell if there's really a relationship, and there will usually be "holes" in the family tree where more recent common ancestors could be hiding.