Appalachian Storyteller

Shelia Kay Adams, an Appalachian storyteller from Sodom, North Carolina, used to tell the story passed down in her family of a distant Indian ancestor.

Later, I heard Adams give a talk where she mentioned that she had participated in the "Ancestry DNA" project.  She stated that she always heard of Native American ancestors in her family history.  When she got the results of the DNA test, nothing like that appeared.  Adams tell the same story here:

 

In this version, she does not mention Native American blood, but she included it in the "exotic blood" that was mentioned in this talk.  Notice that she said that she is forty percent English.  In the talk that I was present at, Shelia Adams said that the people who live in England now are sixty percent English.  Adams' family lived relatively close to the Qualla Indian Reservation, around eighty miles.  Yet this reinforces the idea that there was not as much intermarriage between whites and Native Americans as many people want to believe.