We’ve all seen the t-shirts about how “Punctuation Matters” . . .
And I recently learned first-hand how much placing your words in the correct order ALSO matters.
My entire life, I’ve heard the family story about how one of my Miller ancestors married a Cherokee maiden back during the Trail of Tears era. I have Cherokee documents showing both my Mother and Grandmother’s membership in the Cherokee Nation. It was simply understood as “fact” that I had inherited my Cherokee DNA from a female ancestor.
Enter the power of 2017 technology through Ancestry.com and Facebook. A distant cousin posted on Facebook that she was doing some research, and ran across a hand-written letter from the 1800’s which had been scanned into Ancestry.com. It told the story about the actual origin of our family’s Cherokee heritage.
As romantic as the original family story was, come to find out, it may not be all that accurate. It seems the Millers lived above their General Store, in an area now known to overlap the borders of Oklahoma and Kansas – right along the path of the Trail of Tears. To their dismay, they awoke one morning to discover a small Cherokee boy sitting outside of their establishment. According to the letter, he had gotten lost or left behind, and they immediately adopted him as one of their own.
So, rather than the original story being told as . . .
“A Miller married a Cherokee maiden during the Trail of Tears era.”
It should have been told as . . .
“A small Cherokee boy, lost on the Trail of Tears,
was adopted by the Miller family and grew up to marry a maiden.”
This throws a whole new light on the subject of ancestral DNA . . . where DNA also stands for “Do Not Assume”.
This new info does not dispute our Cherokee heritage . . . BUT for those family members who are trying to connect the dots on the family tree, this creates a whole new grand adventure of exploration down another “limb” of this newly-found maiden’s heritage.
So, whether you are writing your family history or making history by being the first in your family to write a book and grow your business, we can help.
And we promise to help you put your words in the proper order.
To learn more about how our Branding and Publishing programs can help you tell YOUR story, give us call at 888-598-0886.