Surname Index

Chaffin

This family likely also is of Sephardic Jewish ancestry and came from France to England and then to the American Colonies. 

The DNA donor's lineage came through the port of Baltimore (entry point for many 
Sephards) in the 1600's and married into the Hale family, migrating then to Jonesboro, Tennessee. They also married into the Hatchett and Harris families, often marrying cousin after cousin (a mark of Sephardic ancestry). For a good introduction, see The Chaffins by John Lee Fults. 

The Chaffin name may be analogous to Chapin and Coffin; DNA samples would be required to test this. Notably, the Chaffin coat of arms features three crescent moons and daisies -- symbols of Islam. They may have been Muslim and not Jewish. The DNA is centered in Spain/Iberia.

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Leslie

This family is known to have originated from a Hungarian ancestor likely named Bartholomew Laudislau who came to Scotland around 1070 at the invitation of King Malcolm Canmore. The name likely then became altered to Leslie/Lasley. The Leslies produced several prominent statesmen, generals, and judges. 

One line of the family migrated to Russia, where they fought in the armies of the Czar. The Leslie family is centered around Aberdeen, Scotland and immigrated to the American Colonies by the early 1700's. 

Some Leslies are known to have married Jewish persons in Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia -- an unlikely event unless the family was also Jewish in ancestry. Panton-Leslie was the largest international trading firm in the American Colonies during the American Revolutionary War, trading with England, Spain, France and America. They were  essentially 'above the law'. 

The Leslie DNA sample we obtained is centered in the Mediterranean, especially Spain and Portugal. 

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Berry

The Berry family is one of the earliest documented European families to arrive in North America. Some Berry men were members of the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke (1587) and it is not known whether or not they survived. Other Berry's arrived from England from the very early 1600's onward, settling first in Jamestown and other early Virginia settlements. 

The DNA sample we have came from a Berry male from Tennessee whose ancestors had arrived in Virginia. The marriage of Abraham Lincoln's parents was performed in the home of a Berry (and not a church) suggesting that not only the Lincolns, but also the Berry's were of Jewish descent. We believe that many of the very earliest settlers who came to North America from England were actually Sephardic Jews. 

If you will examine the name lists for both Roanoke and Jamestown, you will see that many/most are French and Spanish. These persons would have been willing to undertake the very dangerous trip to North America because they would have feared the arrival of the Spanish Armada (and the Catholic Inquisition) in England in 1588. Notably, the foodstuffs aboard the Roanoke-bound ship were mostly  Mediterranean (e.g., figs, spices, tomatoes, onions, etc.) and not what one would expect an "English" population to be eating. 

The Berry DNA collected is centered in Spain/Iberia. 

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SAYLOR and HARRY / HARRE 

These two families are discussed together because they were both German/Swiss, arrived in Maryland by the 1760's and married multiple times to each other. By 1778, one of the Saylor/Harry children, a daughter named Magdalen, had married George Nye/Ney/Nigh. The Ney family was also from Germany/Switzerland and has Semitic DNA and a known Jewish ancestry.

Quite remarkably, the Harry and Saylor DNA scores are a 12/12 match with each other and also are a 12/12 match with the Caldwell, Yates and Ramey DNA scores. This means that Elizabeth Hirschman paternal ancestors shared the same DNA from three different sources within two generations and also that this DNA matched one of Hirschman's mother's ancestral DNA lines (Yates). 

It also means that Don Panther-Yates' paternal DNA and that of his wife, Teresa, match each other. Further, all of these matings took place within a 200 or so mile radius by folks coming from four different European countries (Germany, France, England and Scotland). Finally, they were all carrying a DNA pattern centered in Iberia/Spain. Of course the odds of this happening by chance are virtually nil. 

These data strongly support, we propose, a purposeful pattern of migration and intermarriage by Sephardic Jews who knew of each other's existence and ancestry and were somehow able to communicate with one another over great distances. Notably, at least some members of these families appear to have been aware of their Jewish ancestry up through the late 1800's when we find Saylors marrying, for example, persons surnamed Israel, Wolf and Meyer and naming children Ephraim, Levi, Abraham, Jacob, Solomon and Jalana.

 

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Skeen

The first Skeen known to arrive in the American Colonies was born in Aberdeen, Scotland and came to New Jersey in 1690. The DNA sample obtained came from one of his descendants. The area around Aberdeen we believe was largely crypto-Jewish, meaning persons there practiced their religion in secret, while pretending to be Catholic and, later, Protestant. 

A portion of the Skeen family migrated to Virginia and North Carolina, with several members settling in Wise County, Virginia. John Skeen is listed on the 1758 Frederick County, Virginia Rent Rolls. Jacob Skeen owned land in Randolf County, North Carolina. His name is listed on the 1779 tax list. Alexander Skeen is found on the 1769 Census living in Dobbs County, North Carolina. James Skeen owned land in Shenandoah County, Virginia, his name appears on the 1783 tax list. John Skeen owned land in Shenandoah County, Virginia, he can be found on the 1783 Tax List living in Shenandoah County, Virginia.

They intermarried with the Gold, Greene, Lea, Symeson and Sargent families, which we believe were Jewish in ancestry. Names such as Casto (surname), Mecca, Ann and Sephronia suggest that the family may have had Sephardic and perhaps Muslim connections, as well. 

An excellent biography is available from the Wise County Historical Society by Jerry Evans and Jessica-Jean Skeen. 

The Skeen DNA is very rare and only matches other Skeens.

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Wampler

Hans Peter Wampfler left the Palatinate region of Germany and came to America in 1741 aboard the ship Lydia. (See the books by Fred B. Wampler for more details). They arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and settled first in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania with a large contingent of Germans. Although ostensibly German Reformed in religion, some of the so-called Pennsylvania  Dutch/Deutch were actually Jewish. 

We believe that the Wamplers were Jewish due to their naming patterns (e.g., Israel, Jacob, Leah), marriage patterns (other believed Jewish families, e.g., Bozzell, Wolfe) and migration patterns, i.e., to Wise County Virginia. 

The Wampler DNA matches several persons currently Jewish.

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Moore

This surname is common, so one must be very careful to collect DNA from a known relative in order to determine origins. This DNA sample is from a Moore family which immigrated to Virginia in the early 1700's from England and then came to live in Melungeon settlements in Appalachia.

We believe that many persons surnamed Moore, Muir, Morea and Moorhead, received those names as a result of immigrating to Britain from the Mediterranean, where Moro meant dark or swarthy. Many were likely Sephardic Jews. They may also have been Moors (i.e., Muslims) from Spain who left during the Inquisition.

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Givens

The donor for this sample is from Southern Ohio and comes from the Givens family which lived in Appalachia (West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky). It is Elizabeth Hirschman's belief that this particular family may have originally been Huguenot from France, where the name may have been Givan, and then immigrated to Northern Ireland with a large contingent of Huguenots in the 1700's.

Many of these Huguenots were originally Sephardic Jews who either genuinely converted to Protestantism or used Protestantism as a cover for clandestine Jewish practice. 

The Givens DNA sample is rare and centered in Greece, Italy, and the Balkans.

 

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“Southern U.S. Native American DNA Project”

Melungeon and Indian Surname

By Dr. Donald Panther-Yates

YATES

 The sample for this common surname was taken from me, Donald Panther-Yates. Panther (which can also appear as Pardo, Brown and Painter) is a maternal surname and Yates my father’s name, so my y-chromosome reflects a YATES line of descent. It matched Elizabeth Hirschman's CALDWELL and my wife’s RAMEY line, among others, and proves to be one of the most populous of all male haplotypes studied so far. According to Joseph Jacobs in the authoritative 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia (s.v. “Names, Personal”), Yates is a contraction similar to Katz (the most common Jewish surname). It is composed of the first letters of the Hebrew word Ger, meaning “convert,” and zedeks, a modifier signifying “righteous, generous, pious, faithful.” (It is evident, then, that the founder of this large family was non-Semitic.)

The usual form in German and Ashkenazic lands was Goetz, or Getz, which has approximately the same pronunciation as Yates/Gates. Old English pronunciation (and even today’s Tidewater Virginia accent) often blends y and g sounds together, as in “The gyirl in the gyarden.” Other forms are Oetz, Utz, Aytes and Jets, which probably reflect a filtering through French and Dutch. Abbreviations such as GZ and KZ are said to derive from Rhineland Jewry.

They are associated with fraternal orders and guilds at Speyer, Mainz and Augsburg, important centers of Jewish life in Frankish lands before the division into Ashkenaz and Sepharad. Not all instances of YATES or GATES are Jewish, however. The Anglo-Saxon word yate (“gap,” “pass”), a variant of “gate,” is probably the source of most of today’s Yateses. The name can also appear as Yeats, Yeatts, Yeates, Gates and Yats. Its earliest mention is on a Rent Roll of the 11th century: Adam de Jette. The Ashkenazic family of Eliakim Goetz of Stelitz, whose son Samuel Yates became rabbi of Liverpool, is given by Malcolm H. Stern, Americans of Jewish Descent (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1960), p.220. 

My earliest known ancestor in America is John Yates, Esq. He was born about 1575 in England and was living at Elizabeth City according to a list made on February 16, 1623. He appears in early Virginia records as “Mr. Yates” and was evidently in the shipping business. His son John married Joan or Johanna JOBE. A grandson by the same name, born in 1640, had a collection of books and founded one of the first public schools in America. A great-grandson, also by the same name, was a saddler and innkeeper who built one of the first blockhouses on the Virginia frontier, the Yates Tavern, near Gretna, in what became Pittsylvania County. This area around Danville, like the Yadkin River valley to the south, served as an important staging area for Jewish settlement in Kentucky and Tennessee beginning in the 1760s. Other Virginia families who traveled with the YATESES along the same route were SIZEMORE, COOPER, SHELDON, GOOD, and BOLLING. For a YATES genealogy report, see “Yates and Cooper Cherokee-Choctaw-Sephardic Genealogies.”

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Cooper

COOPER is one of the most common surnames in the English language. Our sample came from a cousin of Don Panther-Yates’s mother, Bessie Cooper Yates. These COOPERS are a prominent “Black Dutch” family in the Sand Mountain area of northeast Alabama and northwest Georgia, which forms the southern extension of Waldens Ridge and has always had a notable Melungeon population. COOPER like YATES is Ashkenazic in origin and must be distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon occupational surname of the same spelling, a word derived from “coop,” something to keep or hold things, whether in a cask or a hen in her prison. According to English Ancestral Names - The Evolution of the Surname from Medieval Occupations, by J.R. Dolan (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1972), Cooper is an Ashkenazic anglicized form of Kupfer and Kupper(e). COOPER can indicate a cabinetmaker, toolmaker, molder or minter as well as barrel maker. As a Jewish surname, Cooper also appears as Shapiro (“one from Speyer”), Sapiro, Shaeffer, Spier, Spiro, Sofer, Hooper, Kooper, Coopper, Kieffer, Kuepfer, Cuoper, Coupard etc. The word was originally Romano-Frankish and was NOT equivalent to tonnelier, the French word for "barrel maker." It meant something more like "copper worker," "cup person," “metallurgist” and may have been a noble title, like Stuart (“steward”). 

The word “cup” is related. Cupifer (“cup-bearer”) is the title of one of the Knights of the Round Table in Arthurian saga. “Copper” has approximately the same root in all European languages. The mining, export and working of this metal has been a field dominated by Jews throughout the ages.

“Simon Cooper was the first of the name to become noted in official affairs in England, being appointed Sheriff of London in 1310. This was in the fourth year of the reign of King Edward II. He was the acknowledged ancestor of the great and widespread family of the name in the British Isles. His son, Robert Cooper, became groom of the bedchamber to King Henry V. Descending through several generations, various members of the family have held high positions in official life in Great Britain. 

Sir John Cooper was the member of Parliament from the Borough of Whitechurch, Hampshire in 1586. One of his daughters married Robert Baker, envoy of King James to the Spanish throne. His son, John, was created a Baronet, July 4, 1622. He married Anne, daughter of Sir Anthony Ashley and through her acquired practically all of the vast estates of the Ashley family.” – William Ross Cooper, History of the Cooper and Ross Families of England, Scotland, Ulster & America (about 1932). (The ASHLEYS were probably also Jewish in origin,     (Heb. Asher, "Assyrian".)

Some other early bearers of the surname were: Richard Le Cupere in 1176; Alan le Cupere, col Camb. 1273; Henry le Cupper, co. Notts.; Richard le Cupare, co. Oxf.; Jordan le Cupere, co. Oxf.; Willelmus Couper, 1379, P. t. Yorks. p. 5; Robrt Cupper, bailiff of Yarmouth, 1425; FF.xi.324; William Cooper and Winifred Cope, married 1607, St. Michael, Cornhill, p. 18; London, 275, 4; New York, 213. The same surname is frequently adduced from Poland and Russia, where it is invariably Jewish.

"Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, their son, was the author and member of Parliament who succeeded in passing the law giving right of Habeas Corpus in England. He became Lord High Chancellor of England during the reign of King Charles. He was one of the ablest generals against Oliver Cromwell. He later espoused the cause of Cromwell. His descendant is  the present Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (seat: St. Giles House, Dorset and Belfast Castle). The family obtained the large estates in Ireland of confiscated lands granted by Cromwell about 1653. The estates are near Belfast." –Ibid.

The earliest known ancestor of the test subject is thought to be Reuben Cooper, who arrived in Quaker Philadelphia in 1701 with his wife, a HOWARD, and sixteen Baptists from the counties of Pembroke, and Caermarthen, South Wales, sailing in the ship "James and Mary" from Milford-haven, Wales. This was the beginning of the settlement of the Welsh Tract, south of Newark, Delaware, by Baptists (History of the Welsh Tract Baptist Church Pencader Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware, by D. V. Spangler: Signs of the Times, Inc., Route 5, Box 332F, Danville, Va., pp. 2.3). See also "History of the St. of Delaware.," by Henry C. Conrad, Wilmington, Del., 1908 III, 1049. Reuben may have been the same as Robert Cooper. One of this name obtained land grants in the Norfolk area where later, Reuben’s son James lived and died (Surry Co.). The HOWARDS were another noble English family, related to the Dukes of Norfolk.

There is a COOPER DNA Surname Project,  but our Cooper (R1b, or AMH) matched none of its test subjects and thus does not fit with any of the project’s 12 identified lines. Remember, Cooper is a popular name. As for our line, exact Y-DNA matches were found in France, Germany and the Philippines (European admixture)—just the places Jewish people lived. 50 matches were found in the International Y-STR User Database, using 9 markers. These included individuals from Asturias, Barcelona, Cantabria, Central East Spain, Cologne, Colombia, Croatia, Graz, Freiburg, Galicia, London, Magdeburg, Northern Poland, Northern Portugal, Paris, Sao Paulo, Southern Portugal, Strasbourg, Sweden and Tuscany. 

The Spanish and Portuguese matches (together with those from their colonies, such as Colombia and the Philippines) are only to be accounted for as descendants of Goths, the last major population to occupy Spain before the Arab invasion of 711. They cannot be Romans or Celts or Semites or Franks or any other European stock, not with the given pattern of genetic distribution. Romans, for instance, are never found in Scandinavia, and Franks are never found in Russia. By the same logic and historical reasoning, we can say that the Goths left a major contribution to bloodlines of the inhabitants of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal. In fact, in the list of cities above, one can virtually see the footsteps of the Visigothic and Ostrogothic hordes that overran the Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries and built kingdoms in Narbonne and Spain in the early middle ages. Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic matches point to the ultimate homeland of the Goths in Scandinavia. 

We theorize that the deep blue eyes combined with a rather dark or olive complexion found among many Melungeon and families, is the genetic signature of the Goths. Portions of this population converted to Judaism as early as the Narbonne kingdom and Visigothic rule in Spain. Charlemagne’s mother was a Jewess who came from the duchy of Toulouse, a later successor state to Theodoric the Great’s settlement in Provence governed by a namesake who was from a gaonic family from Babylonia. The earliest Jewish COOPER can probably be placed in Carolingian times; the trail leads again to Speyer as some Cooper families also have the surname Shapiro/Shaeffer and the like. 

The family evidently came over to England from France with William the Conqueror and branches of it contained to practice Judaism in an underground fashion with the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1290. In America, remembering their Jewish roots, Coopers married with openly Sephardic families like the GISTS, French Huguenots, other English crypto-Jews, Scottish crypto-Jews and American Indians.

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SIZEMORE

The results of James Sizemore’s Y-STR test shocked many but simply confirmed what others in the family had known all along. Most Sizemores are Native American. Q3 is the only haplogroup exclusively associated with American Indians. Subsequently, three other Sizemores/Sisemores matched our subject and a large Sizemore Surname DNA Project was undertaken. This project found several distinct Sizemore lines, with the apparently largest being ours. James Sizemore traces his lineage back to a William Ephraim Sizemore born about 1700 who married Winifred Green, the daughter of Henry Green (whose will William Sizemore witnessed in 1761) and Elizabeth Griffin. According to family tradition, the family always lived on the frontier, which moved, beginning across the river from Jamestown in Surry County and later becoming fixed in Pittsylvania County, finally in Kentucky. 

Several years ago, Virginia Easley DeMarce, a professional genealogist, attempted in a long discussion paper on the Internet once and for all to lay to rest all claims of Indian blood by Sizemores (the pages have since been removed). In the same spirit, she attacked and dismissed Brent Kennedy’s book The Melungeons (National Genealogy Society Quarterly Vol. 84, No. 2, June 1996). Sizemore family history is now in a state of great agitation.

The big question is: What kind of Indian? My guess is Arawak or some other Caribbean Indian. As Kennedy suggested, the first Sizemore in America was a Portuguese Jew and servant or slave on Barbados. SIZEMORE is cognate with Cismor and similar Jewish surnames. A related word is “assize,” which means tax or payment. 

The surname does not occur in England except as the name of a merchant, likely a foreigner. I believe when the English liberated Barbados they freed certain slaves. One of them was a Creole—Indian mixed with black. He bore his master’s name, a Portuguese Jew called Cismor. It is a little appreciated fact that Indian males were used to breed Negro slaves who would have greater heat resistance on the sugar plantations. Usually, the “stud” was actually himself the product of a mixed union of white and Indian. 

A William Sismor and wife Martha were counted among the Living and the Dead in Virginia, 1623. He was identified as "Negor." Famous members of the family have been George Goldenhawk Sizemore, George Chief of All Sizemore, John Gourd Sizemore, an Indian doctor, and Old Ned Sizemore. The Sizemores filed over 2,200 applications for the Eastern Cherokee Band in 1907, representing over 7,000 persons and filling the entire vol. 10 in the Guion-Miller depositions. In the late 1830's, Sizemores are said to have taken in Cherokees who escaped the Trail of Tears. 

This is the point at which many may have literally become Cherokee. Momfeather, Chief Elder of the Southern Band of Cherokees informed me that Sizemore is a well-known Cherokee name and that the Sizemores and other Indian families in Eastern Kentucky were known as the Stick People. This name was given, according to legend because large piles of sticks high in the Appalachian ridges were used by Sizemores to hide numbers of Cherokees who escaped the horrible Trail of Tears in the1800's. Evidently they later mixed with these Cherokees, which may have been the founding of the Whitetop Laurel Band of Cherokees.

Following is an excerpt from an article on the George All Sizemore and Aggy Shepard connection to the Creeks and the Whitetop Laurel Band of Cherokees. "The marriage of George "ALL" Sizemore to Aggy Shepard originated from a raid of Indians on the white man’s camp where they captured a white girl. In retaliation, the white men followed and rescued the girl and captured an Indian girl who was later given to a white family to raise (Aggy). Aggy is thought to have been a Creek Indian. George lived in both the white man's world, and the Whitetop Cherokee tribe throughout his life."

The SIZEMORES intermarried with cousins by the name of GREEN, BLEVINS, JACKSON, HART, GREGORY, BOLLING, COOPER and ANDERSON.

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BOWLES

The interest in this surname derives from the fact that it was the surname of a major chief of the Cherokee Indians—Chief John Bowles, known incongruously as The Bowl (Duwali, in Cherokee). One book about him is Chief Bowles and the Texas Cherokees, by Mary Whatley Clarke. The Bowles family was non-Cherokee, in fact a Maryland settler family. In this respect, Chief Bowles, who won fame by settling the Texas Band of Cherokees in the West and who died at the age of 84 in a war party in 1839, resembles “The Glass,” in actuality a white man named Thomas Glass, of North Carolina. Another Bowles was the adventurer William Augustus Bowles (1763-1805), who became a Creek chief, the inspiration for the title Billy among the Seminoles as well as the foundation of the colorful Billy Bowlegs figure of pirate legends. He published his memoirs in London in 1791. Our BOWLES sample came from Harold Bowles, who traces his ancestry to Chief Bowles, who was born about 1746 and died July 16, 1839. Bowles married three or more women, all Cherokee, including Jennie Due, the daughter of Robert Due and Elizabeth Emory; Oo-ti-yu VANN, and Oo-lootsa, daughter of Tah-chee, half-brother to Sequoyah. 

According to Emmett Starr, John Bowles was the son of a Scots trader and Cherokee woman. His father was killed and robbed by two North Carolinians while on his way home from Charlestown when the son was only 12 years old. Within the next two years, the fair-complexioned, auburn haired boy had killed both his father’s slayers. Bowles’s story strongly echoes that of John WATTS, another red-headed, fair complexioned Cherokee halfblooded chief of the time.

So where did the male Bowles line originate? The haplogroup is J2, which originated in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia and includes the famous Cohen gene carried by both Jews and Arabs. There is a two-step mutation that is Ashkenazi. We suggest Bowles DNA is Semitic in the context of Lombardic as the host population. The Lombards were a fierce tribe in back of the Goths who invaded and conquered the whole of Italy in the 6th century. Our Bowles sample had no exact matches, but if you substitute 14, 17 for 15, 17 at DYS in the International Y-STR Forensic User Database, there is one match in Tyrol. Substituting 10 for 11 at DYS 391 produces multiple scores from Latium, Umbria, Lombardy (named for the Lombard invaders), Albania, Berlin, Budapest, Bulgaria, Cologne, Bydgoszcz, and a solitary Scandinavian match in southern Norway. There are also a number of Hispanic matches. If you look at a map of these two-off mutations you can practically see the route taken by the Langobards, later called Lombards, as they descended on Italy from northern Germany, traveling through Tyrol and going all the way down to Umbria in the toe of Italy. No other invaders – Ostrogoths, Visigoths, etc. – had exactly the same pattern of penetration. It is said that Italy was depopulated by the ravages of the Lombards, with as few as 50 families left in Rome. The inference is it was repopulated by them and Lombard genes must therefore be common among Italians. A possible explanation for the Bowles name is that it derives from Bolzano/Bozen, the chief trading city south of the Brenner pass in the Italian Etschland, or Alto Adige. Bozen was a Lombard walled citadel similar to Pavia, the nation’s better known capital during the middle ages. Until the modern period, the term “Lombard” and “Jew” were synonymous, as both people were well known for their mercantile interests, including banking, not to mention their unique development  of weaving, silk and textile arts. Lombard College in England, for instance, was named for a Jewish merchant, and “Lombard Street” in most Atlantic metropolises housed the foreign merchants, insurance brokers, stockbrokers, money lenders and jewelers. Lombard law governed all transactions of an international character. Throughout the centuries, Lombards from Milan, Genoa and Turin were fellow travelers with French, Italian and Sephardic Jews, even apparently in Scotland, the coastal cities of colonial America and on the Indian frontier. In the March feature “You’ll Never Find the Truth,” we have presented evidence suggesting that the origin of the Lumbee name lies in “Lombard-ton.”

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McABEE

We were very excited to have Michal McKee write to us and volunteer her 80-year-old uncle, Marvin McAbee, for the “Southern U.S. Native American DNA Study.” Family tradition told of how the McAbees of Kentucky claimed to be descendants of the Maccabees, the 2nd-1st cent.B.C.E. Hasmonean convert family who sought to rebuild the temple and reestablish the Jewish state in Jerusalem. Though ostensibly Scottish, the McAbee family was self-consciously Jewish in heritage. 

 

To the consternation of Bennett Greenspan, McAbee DNA proved to have no matches anywhere and could not be assigned to a haplogroup. Resorting again to the International Y-STR Forensic User Database, we found no exact matches in all of Europe or Asia. The closest haplotype was Bulgarian/Turkic/Romani, but this was four markers off from our scores—pretty distant. McAbee remains a mystery. Perhaps we should regard it as Hasmonean, the first large population to convert to Judaism.

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 ROGERS

Interest in this common surname came from its having been borne by several prominent halfblood or wholly white Cherokee chiefs, including Chief John Hellfire Rogers, a trader who was another husband, in addition to Robert Due, Tahlonteskee and Chief John Jolly, of Elizabeth Emory, a descendant of Ludovic GRANT and Elizabeth Tassel. Ludovic Grant, a Scotsman, is thought to be the first high-profile marriage partner of a clanswoman from the Echota Cherokee hierarchy (excepting James Beamour and Quatsi). Our test subject was Tom Rogers, who traced his line back to a John Rogers (1749-1823), husband of an unknown Indian woman. The presence of Peytons in the family tree shows a link with Gen. Sam Houston (Cherokee name Kolanu, or Raven), whose first love in Gallatin, Tennessee was Belle Peyton (her mother, incidentally, was Tihanama). Belle loved Houston but could not tolerate the open wound he had received in his groin from a sharp cane puncture during Jackson’s campaigns in the War of 1812. Houston went into despair, began to drink heavily and turned his back on white society. He joined his foster father Chief John Jolly, formerly of the Long Island, and married Tiana ROGERS in Indian Territory before moving to Texas and settling down with Margaret Moffette Lea of Mobile, with whom he raised a large family.

Another Rogers (Charles) married Rachel Hughes, a granddaughter of Nancy Ward, the Beloved Woman. These families were multiply entwined. As with Bowles, Rogers produced no exact matches anywhere, though it was classified as R1b. In the Y-STR Database, it had 17 matches, including Berlin, Cantabria, Cologne, Freiburg, Friesland, Graz, Ljubliana, Lombardy, London, Mainz, Marche, Northern Portugal, Paris, Sao Paulo, Strasbourg and Warsaw. This distribution pattern suggests one of the Germanic tribes that repopulated France and the Iberian Peninsula after the fall of the Roman Empire, perhaps a Visigothic founder or possibly Swabian. Roger is a Frankish name (from Rudiger) and the soft g shows a French-speaking background. The most famous namesake is the benevolent Norman conqueror of Sicily, who ushered in a blending of Arabic, Jewish, Greek, Italian, Viking, French and African cultures in the 11th century (and gave the Papacy the idea for the Crusades to win back lands lost to the Arabs). 

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FLORES

Here we encounter more Iberian Visigothic/Vandal/Swabian DNA with Asturia as a modal score, according to the Y-STR Database. It is another unique, non-matching R1b. The subject was Douglas Flores, who claims descent from Greenwood LeFlore, a Choctaw chief who managed to remain in Mississippi when his people were removed to Indian Territory by the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. He built a notable mansion called Malmaison outside Teoc and filled it with rich furnishings (since burned). Interestingly, the family seems to have returned to a Portuguese spelling of their surname. According to reliable sources, “Louis LeFlore, the father of Greenwood LeFlore, owned some of the first keel boats on the Mississippi and Tombigbe rivers and laid the foundation of a large fortune. He established an extensive plantation and cattle ranch in Yazoo Valley, in the present county of Holmes, where he died a few years after the last treaty with the Choctaws. He had 100 slaves and as many Indians living about him. He was a small man, a French Canadian. Though over eighty years old he was a great hunter and often spent whole days in overflowed swamps and prairies. Trading houses were established under the supervision of the governor on the Tombigbee for the Choctaws, and near Fort Pickens for the Chickasaws. The first goods sent to the former were consigned to Louis LeFlore. He carried them in a keel boat from Natchez, down the river to Manchac, thence down to Amite, across the lakes and up the Tombigbee to Ft. Stoddard the point of delivery. Joseph Chambers was the first factor and George S. Gains, his successor. Greenwood LeFlore was a son of Louis LeFlore and Rebecca Cravat, an Indian Princess. It is interesting to know that his father established a trading post and called it LeFlore Bluff which is where the city of Jackson, the capitol of Mississippi now is situated.”’

Other Surnames of Interest. The Southern U.S. Native American DNA Project sought male volunteers who bear their surname by reason of direct father-son descent from any southeastern Indian trader who was active in the 1700s or earlier among the Cherokee, Chickasaw and other southeastern tribes. 

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