For a long time I was into genealogy. It was fun and I learned things I never knew, met relatives I’d never heard of, and dispelled at least one family story that had been around forever.

The story was about our Indian Ancestor.

From the time I can remember, my mother told me the story. It was a well-developed story with a lot of specific information. Here’s the way it went.

He was an Indian chief named Red Eagle. His so-called English name was William Weatherford. He was a Creek Indian who led an uprising against a group of English settlers at Fort Mims, Alabama.

The story gets kind of murky after that. In fact, it disappears entirely except for a couple of murky connection between us and Red Eagle. Weatherford was my mother’s family’s surname. And she also pointed to such towns as Weatherford, Oklahoma and Weatherford, Texas, which, she said were named after Red Eagle and where her father once lived. These are tenuous connections at best.

It just so happens that Red Eagle is a well-known historical character. There is a lot of information available about him, including a book of roughly 800 pages which lists an entire record of his ancestors and descendants from the 1700’s to the time of the book of , about 1980.

I went through the entire book from page one to page 800 about three times. Unless I was thoroughly blind, there wasn’t a single mention of a single one of our relatives, who a cousin has traced back to Virginia and the British Isles and France. No connection. Nil, nada, zilch.

Of course, just because a name doesn’t appear in a list doesn’t mean there wasn’t a connection. We could have been descended from an illegitimate branch. Those things happen. Or my eyes could have been tired.

But perhaps even more interesting, I learned that Red Eagle himself, the great Creek Chief and warrior, was one-eighth Indian. The rest of him was British Isles titanium white.

Given the number of generations between his and mine, the amount of Indian blood in my veins is probably on a par with or less than General Custer’s.

Myth dispelled?

Not at all.

When I laid out my findings in front of my sister, she had a short, straight and to the point response. “Well, they’re wrong.”

Myth lives.

But my experience illustrates a point. There are many people who look like me who purport to be part-Indian. I think it’s fashionable as long as they don’t actually look like an Indian. But, in fact, their stories are probably just as ephemeral as mine.

One of my dad’s cousins once told me that his grandmother was an “Indian maiden,” a term quite often used in the world of family myth. He even said he had a picture of her in full regalia but he had lost it. There are a lot of lost pictures of Indian Maidens around somewhere.

I may return to my story someday for more research. But right now I have other things on my mind. Like weaning myself  from my daily milk shake or chocolate dipped cone from Dairy Queen. I’m on day seven of rehab and my belt is looser by an inch.