Grandma's Granny's Family Album

     We know we are descended from Mayflower passenger Richard Warren, we are somehow descended from the first European woman in New York, some of our West family think our Massachusetts Wests are the same Wests who founded Virginia (not likely), so could we also be descended from survivors of the Lost Colony of Roanoke?  Could we have had ancestors at the foundings of most of the North American colonies? Artist interpretations of: Englishmen finding the carving on the tree; Westover Plantation, Virginia; Catalyntie Trico rocking her baby in Albany, New York; Richard Warren signing Mayflower Compact Probably not. One of Americans' biggest unsolved mysteries is that of the Lost Colony of Roanoke.   In the 1500s, there was a lot more activity off the southeast coast of North America than we generally think of.  The English were making landings and meeting the local Indians.  But the ships couldn't land in the shallow waters off of present-day North Carolina, so the first European

When I saw my DNA saying I am 1% Nigerian, I knew that it must be from Catherine Oxendine.    (see Attack! and Fall, the Bloody Tragedies of Catherine Oxendine post, see Robertson Pedigree Chart). Now my mother's hair was platinum, so blonde it was almost white.  She was so pale, she could get sunburned in the shade - 2% African.  Auntie Grace's skin resembled white tissue paper - 4% African. Anne Robertson Sulzbach on Jones Beach, NY, abt. 1942 Auntie Grace Robertson Wilson's 96th birthday, June 1980, with grandnephew Gary Brendel (grandson of her brother Joe Robertson) My mother Anne is easy to spot in photos because of her shockingly blonde hair - here in 1922, her father Joe's hair is the same color If we take this back, that means that my great-grandfather Joseph Ellis Robertson was 8% African, his mother Catharine Madden 16%, and the little girl who had to flee the American colonies for Canada, who saw her father shot to death by an arrow, was 32% African.   The m