Source: Advice to White Supremacists: You Might Not Want to Test Your DNA
Thank you, Dick Eastman!
I was thinking, praying about these recent events and remembering some key times as a genealogist in California. I volunteered in a Family History Center as I could translate French and German and the Mormon volunteers had asked me to help out once per week.
As my contact with customers, through Lineage Journeys, evolved over the weeks and months of volunteering, we began to have a fairly steady flow of people from a particular area of town. Known to be descendants of those who migrated to California during the Dust Bowl era, they were descended from people primarily from Oklahoma, Missouri and a few from northern Texas. They came in, as one of them told me, “to document our superior family” …. hmmmm, “superior” equated to “white” and their conversation indicated that they were affiliated in some way with white/neo-nazi groups that I knewto be in the area.
It didn’t take long (perhaps three generations of ancestors) to find census records that indicated “mulatto” – the term used for mixed race individuals on the old census records. Explaining that to these research customers became my personal, silent joy as their visions of superiority were revealed for the arrogant falsehood that they were. Many of them stated variations of “the records were manipulated” or “the census taker lied” or any number of other ways to avoid the obvious.
The fact that “race” isn’t a scientific or biological fact anyway would have been lost on these families, and my personal and professional research experiences had long before shown me that our families migrated, lived in many communities, searched for jobs and good work, and married across religious and ethnic lines for centuries. No surprise here that some “white” people had relationships in the past that weren’t with those of European origin.
Lineage Journeys 