Anne Starkweather (unknown) - DNA Testing Anyone?

Hi Sheldon,
This is a very interesting inquiry. My grandmother was born on the Seneca reservation in New York. We had a long history with the New York tribes, and the Massachusetts tribes. Briefly, my English ancestors who came to what is now Boston, moved away very early on, and purchased land from who I believe are the Wampanoags as a sort of buffer between them and the hardline Puritans (the were Quakers). They alway had very friendly relations with the Native American people and I currently have first cousins who are remnants of these people who were pushed further and further west until they finally settled about the time of the Revolutionary War in the area of New York near Salamanca, New York. This was the Seneca Reservation until 1966 when the Army Corps of Engineers seized much of the land under the pretext that it needed to be acquired to prevent flooding in Pittsburg, PA. Still, some of the land is still their reservation and they have some really excellent historians who are preserving as much history as possible. My family were missionaries to these people and intermarried with them, preserved their language, and traditions. I have had my DNA sequenced which is 98% European (mostly Dutch) but there is 2% "unknown". We definitely have very close familial links to these tribes, but reconstruction of the history is difficult due to so much war at the time. The Seneca were awarded their lands as they sided with the Americans during the Revolutionary War; without their help George Washington would have lost the war. However some of the other tribes were relocated to Bradford Ontario, as they sided with the British, which further broke up their history. From my research, the Wampanoags, the Mohawk, and others were forced back to Seneca lands. I have DNA links to the reservation outside Montreal, and others in Canada, as well as other families who are definitely natives, through the missionary efforts in these areas. Feel free to contact me for more information. I too would like to build this area of the tree out, as it is sorely lacking in information.

Thank you for that fascinating reply and I hope we can communicate more. I expect that native American is coming up as "unknown" in many DNA tests because there is far less baseline available for comparison. On my father's side, we are supposed to have a native ancestor from the Delaware tribe, but I have only speculation and a very "white" sounding name and no parents as to who she was. Even a century ago, being native was not a point of pride so families tended to hide these marriages. It would be excellent if we can get some tribal members to work with us on this project. I understand how they might be suspect of our intentions. It has never gone well when they have been approached in the past by outsiders, which sorry to say we have become by our ancestors blending with the European colonizers.

Private User I am a direct descendant of John and Anne Starkweather through my father. My mother has no native ancestry, all European, Sub Saharan and North African. My DNA test through 23andMe did come back with 0.1% native, and another 0.1% unknown. This matches up to Anne having been my 10th-great-grandmother, and makes sense in terms of the timeline around King Philip's War and the documentation of Metacomet and his family in Mary Rowlandson's 1682 account of her time as a captive of Metacomet. I also ran my raw data through other websites (My True Ancestry and GEDCOM) just to further confirm the validity of native DNA. Both affirmed markers in my DNA for a native connection.