When I was young, there wasn't any stories told. Never thought about it. The adults kept their conversations to themselves and my cousins and I romped outside in joyful bliss.
When I grew older and was taking classes that asked about family origins, I asked my dad's mother what our family's heritage was... Dutch, or English... Her favorite answer was "Dutch, Devil, and dog..." 😕Well, that didn't help. So I would press her, and her answer would be we are Black Dutch... I was pretty sure we didn't have any Negro in our background, so I decided to search on my own. I was in my teens. It would not be until I was much older and had become a genealogist I would find what she was alluding to, and understood her mysterious method of telling me what she thought was true.
Black Dutch was a term was adopted [by some people] as an attempt to disguise Indian or infrequently, tri-racial descent. We lived in a small town next to an indian reservation. My grandfather had been a blacksmith and was well known. My older cousin was derogatory toward the old indian men who would get drunk and sit by the bank on the benches outside. I don't think she knew the belief in my grandmother's family that they had indian blood from the 1600s. I am pretty sure that my grandmother was the only one who had any knowledge of the efforts of her mother's family to prove that they were of Native American Descent. There were some by the name of Self that were accepted into the Choctaw Tribe, but it appeared it was through marriage.
We tried autosomal DNA the time period of the 1600s was too far back to pick up Native American DNA. So unless a wild find in records comes forth, it will remain Folklore. #52 Ancestors
