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.
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 murdered man, 64% African.
How do we know this?
In 2019, our last trip thru Nova Scotia before everything closed for COVID, Cousin Debbie and I traipsed thru Barrington in Shelburne County. I had never been, but I knew our ancestor Catharine Madden was from there. It was so pretty and had a historic woolen mill; we wanted to come back.
We were able to meet with the local genealogist and read thru the notes of Amos Doane, a prolific writer who kept personal journals on all the goings-on in the area, a treasure chest for researchers. I had already read the story of how Catharine Madden's father Michael "fell from a large rock while watching his sons eeling, and died there." But Amos had other stories of our family too - Michael's first wife Isabella, who was so fat she "kept a girl to light her pipe," drowned while crossing the harbor with another lady and some kids. I can picture the old salt knowing enough to hang on to the capsized boat while the women, weighed down by heavy dresses, went right down. Most compelling was the story of the Indian attack when Catherine Oxendine was a toddler. I read that in 3 different sources before I found her father's name - Benj. - a scribbled add-on. A helpful summer intern had piqued my curiosity by transcribing it as Barry, most definitely not a 1700s name, which led me to look it up myself. Talk about reading between the lines!
Catherine and Martha Oxendine are mentioned in several records in Shelburne, spelled Oxenden, Oxendine, and Oxendein. An unusual enough name that I could just type it into Ancestry.com and see what came up. Almost every Oxendine is from Robeson County, North Carolina, and the ones who aren't, have parents from there. I remembered that Martha's father and second husband were soldiers in the Carolinas. More specifically, the name Benjamin Oxendine has been passed down since the early 1700s. But get this --- Every single Oxendine is an Indian.
If Benjamin was an Indian, why was he murdered by them?
An Oxendine obituary described its subject as "a proud Lumbee," so I looked that up. The Lumbee of North Carolina are the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River, with 50,000 members. Why have I never heard of them? Well, they are still fighting for tribal recognition, and a(nother) bill is in Congress right now. They got sort-of recognized in the 1950s when they got the name Lumbee, but none of the benefits that go with recognition.
The Lumber River as it winds through Robeson County, North Carolina. The decomposing peat underneath gives it its black color. Its former name, Drowning Creek, indicates how hard it was to navigate.
The Lumbee tribe is so old, it's new. Their origins are still being explored. Most recognized tribes have written documentation of their being a tribe, recorded by the white settlers who encountered them. That's because they were encountered in the 1800s in the West. East Coast tribes were encountered by whites in the 1600s, and there's not as much written about them. The Lumbee, in particular, are an amalgamation of other tribes that were decimated by the Europeans, especially by diseases like smallpox. Those fragments of tribes banded together in the swamps of the Lumbee (or Lumber) River, inland along the border of present-day South and North Carolina, away from whites. Their homelands had stretched from South Carolina to Virginia, and they spoke different languages: Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan.
In the last 400 years, the government has sometimes considered the Lumbee to be Indians, and sometimes not. This seems to be because when encountered in the early 1700s, they had English names, spoke English instead of an Indian language, and lived in English-style houses.
Native Americans weren't the only refugees who found a home in the Carolina swamps. Europeans and Africans did too. They were escaping slavery, indentured servitude, jail, and a "civilization" that wouldn't allow inter-racial marriages. Lumbees are a mix of all of those ethnicities.
To prove the accuracy of the hypothesis, Catherine Oxendine was a Lumbee of Nigerian descent, then all my other DNA matches of Madden descent would be Nigerian too, or at least have some other DNA that Lumbees would have. And my other relatives wouldn't. But 1 % is not much; my kids don't have any. I needed DNA from the generation before me, which, if the 1% is accurate, should be double that. And I needed it to be from the Madden/Robertson side of the family. Of my mother's 26 Robertson cousins and siblings in her generation, the only one still alive was my Aunt Jean, age 94. Thankfully, COVID had eased up enough that we could visit, and thankfully, she agreed to spit in a tube.
Aunt Jean is 2% Nigerian!
Because she is a generation back from me, she has many more DNA matches than I do. Many of them (not all) have Nigerian DNA. Yes, they are all descended from Catherine Oxendine, and yes, they have 1% or 2%.
Of course this is way too far to extrapolate based on such small percentages as we have evidence of. If Benjamin Oxendine was born around 1750, he could have been half African, or he could be a combo of Lumbee who had been intermarrying since 1584.
Stay tuned!
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