[cossatot]

My father (who is nominally 1/8th Cherokee; his well-remembered grandfather was half) has been working on our family's genealogy for decades. He believes that many of our ancestors not directly tied to his grandfather were partially Cherokee, and consistently under-reported. There were penalizations for various degrees of Indian blood, not just a binary thing, so this was quite common.

There were also apparently a lot of mixed-blood Cherokee/Scot or Irish ca. 1800 in southern Appalachia before Removal, and some of them were very successful. One of our ancestors, Chief Vann [1], became very wealthy though he was allegedly quite the drunken terror. He lead a sort of clan or tribe of Cherokees, mixed-bloods and some slaves that were associated with a Moravian mission/school (who took civil records that my dad has found on ancestry.com). Apparently there was a fair amount of mixing, as well as a lot if first-cousin marriages and possibly closer interbreeding that may have been a bloodline-perpetuation thing or may have been due to geographical or cultural isolation. I think the setup might actually be similar to modern small chiefdoms in Afghanistan. Vann was incidentally killed because of his bad behavior, in a way that reminds me of the fate of western Florida's Edgar J Watson [2] that Peter Matthiessen wrote so masterfully about[3].

But that's digressing a little bit...

By now, though, there has been enough dilution in my family that I don't think I would be any more than 1/8th; I think I'm probably more around 1.5/16ths. My mother's family, though having been in the Ozarks since the 1840s or so, has no indication of non-European blood.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Vann [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokoloskee,_Florida [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/23/home/matthiessen-wats...