 assume that your local library has
all of the local histories for your area. Each
library has different holdings so try to visit all of
the ones in the neighbouring towns and villages.
Talk to People
Other researchers are the greatest
asset available to you. When Art finds a record
online of an Indian he sends an email to the website
host and asks about other Indians they may be aware of.
Art just added several thousand Metis names to his
database by doing this – all descendants of one of his
Indian ancestors who lived in the 1600s.
Don’t guard your research like a
treasure, share it with others. Occasionally you
will run into someone who only wants to take what you
have and give nothing in return. It doesn’t take
long to recognize these people. The vast majority
of the time you will gain information that you didn’t
have, and might never have found.
Talk to everyone in your family.
Start with the older people but don’t forget your
brothers, sisters and cousins. You will be
surprised by things your relatives know that you don’t.
Ask about family bibles, old deeds, wills, and birth,
marriage and death certificates. Old letters and
postcards sometimes contain valuable information.
There seems to always be one person in every family who
collects family papers and pictures. One tiny fact
can lead you to huge amounts of information.
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When you find a record online for someone you are
searching for, don’t be afraid to contact the person who
put that record online. Provide them with enough
details of how you are connected to that person and they
will almost always be willing to share other information
with you.
Record all the family stories and traditions with
notes on where and when you got them.
DNA Testing
While DNA testing might prove your aboriginal
heritage, there are costs and restrictions.
For a man, it could show your aboriginal ancestry,
but only if the aboriginal was your father, his father,
his father, and so on. For a woman, the aboriginal would
have to have been her mother, her mother’s mother, etc.
Previously, we had some incorrect information here.
Bryan Gidley was kind enough to send us a correction:
“Males carry their mother’s mitocondrial DNA and can be
tested for their maternal line. The ambiguity is that
only the mother can pass the mitochondrial DNA to her
children. The opposite is true, that a female must have
a male sibling or a male in her father’s line test for
Y-DNA.” Mr. Gidley has an excellent website at
www.Searchmytree.com if you would like to learn more on
the subject of DNA. To check all of your ancestors, it
would require testing of many family members, and in
many cases there just aren’t living relatives willing or
available to test all of your ancestral lines.
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Negative results don’t necessarily
mean you don’t have an aboriginal ancestor. Most, but
not all, aboriginals carry a particular gene that is
recognized as aboriginal. The results are not legally
acceptable because a ‘chain of custody’ isn’t
maintained. If you have watched the CSI programs on TV
you’ll know what this means. A court wouldn’t accept the
results because there is no legally acceptable proof
that the results are in fact from your DNA.
Having said all of this, it is
something you might consider. It’s quite fascinating to
see where your maternal and paternal ancestors were in
the world over the centuries.
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