Amerindian Ancestry DNA Project

Those of us who research our own Native American ancestries are confronted by the widely disputed origins of our earliest ancestors. Lacking consistent, recorded genealogies for these “Persons of Interest,” our Native American origins have remained in question, despite the oral histories, circumstantial evidence, intermarriages with other Native Americans, family traditions and customs that call a European lineage into question.

One of our founders of the Amerindian DNA project, Erich Burton, while researching his own Native American family lines, discovered the breakthrough technology available to genealogists - one that could help him uncover, in the absence of records, the origins of his earliest ancestors: the science of DNA testing. As he researched the family lines specific to his own family heritage, which included the founding families of the Bras d’Or Indians, he discovered that one line, that of Anne Marie, wife of an early French settler, Rene Rimbault, had already been characterized, genetically, as “Amerindian” by Anne Marie’s descendent, Marie Rundquist, who had participated in the National Geographic Genographic Program and had published her results along with her maternal line ancestry in a public database. Erich knew from his prior investigation into the Port Royal census reports of nearly four hundred years ago that Anne Marie’s Native American origins were ambiguous. While she lacked the French surname that would have pointed to an obvious European ancestry, Anne Marie’s pedigree remained elusive to genealogists - until Marie’s “Haplogroup A” mitochondrial DNA test results were posted in 2006.

Marie Rundquist was fortunate to have her documented family genealogy well in-hand before posting her results to a public database and publishing her family line. By networking with other test participants who shared her same genetic markers, and reading the many published scientific reports on the subject of Amerindian DNA Haplogroups, Marie was also confident of her Native American origins - and was, after uncovering her own “hidden ancestry,” delighted to share with others the information that her earliest maternal ancestor would have belonged to the Mi’kmaq tribe of Nova Scotia. Using Marie’s tracing of her maternal line ancestry as an example, and researching the Family Tree DNA and other public test result databases (e.g. http://www.mitosearch.org), Erich began to construct a model that employed mtDNA testing to assist in further research of his other maternal lines and show the relationships among the many branches of his family tree to Native American ancestors.

Through experience in tracing Mi’kmaq genealogies within his own and other related family lines, Erich recognized that to pursue family lines back to the earliest days in the histories of the Maritime Provinces of Canada, namely New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia, requires recognition of how many families are intertwined in a shared Native American lineage - and an understanding of how deeply those families are connected - by marriage, geographic proximity and tradition. Erich launched a My Family website to act as a forum where descendents of the Maritime Provinces earliest inhabitants could exchange their own family histories, share common family stories, photographs, and records, and otherwise fill in the gaps in their own research of their Native American ancestry. By communicating with others on the site, Erich discovered that members of this fledgling online community were intensely interested in discovering their Native American ancestries and turning the spotlight on those ancestors whose Native American origins had, for generations, remained “in doubt.”

Inspired by Marie’s positive experience and those of others who had found their own hidden Native American ancestries by having their DNA tested, website participants began to consider ways that DNA testing could be applied to solve some of their more challenging family puzzles. Erich, Marie as well as a number of others decided to initiate a new Family Tree DNA surname project, one that specifically addressed the Native American ancestry of those who traced their family lines back to a region once known as Mi’kma’ki.. The Amerindian DNA project was significant: its purpose was not to publish the well-documented French ancestral lines that continued in Nova Scotia and other Maritime regions, as is the focus of the traditional “Acadian” ancestry studies, but instead to promote investigation of a shared Mi’kmaq heritage and the discovery of non-European, Amerindian origins using the new methods of genetic genealogy. Indeed, the focus of the site is the reverse image of a traditional Eurocentric genealogy study. Rather than highlight, we seek to disprove a 100% European-French heritage among our study participants, and instead demonstrate, through DNA testing, our diverse, non-European, Amerindian heritage, founded in strong Native American family lines.

The Project today has three specific goals:

To fund through personal contribution the DNA testing of those who descend from an identified “Person of Interest” (the “targeted population”), who was most typically, a common ancestor having an unknown, unproven pedigree
To identify and locate potential candidates for DNA testing within our family communities
To research the genealogies of DNA test participants whose test results demonstrate a Native American ancestry, but whose Native American family lines remain untraced.

The Project scope has recently expanded to include also Amerindian links to the Province of Quebec as many descendants of the Maritime and Quebec Provinces share common Native American family lines.