Perhaps it's the synchronicity of having a couple potential clients who want to prove Native American ancestry, but the other day, just sitting on a bench outside a restaurant, I met a man who introduced himself and said he was a Native American genealogy expert. That's not what the outside of his van said, but he handed me his card proving he was accepted into a tribe and said it had taken him 15 years to be accepted.
His route of research was not a steady plan of documentation but I don't hold that against anyone. Most of us have had to go around an individual to find them again such as following a brother or sister or other relative to get back a generation or so.
Then this man blew me away by saying he had a personal database of HALF A MILLION NAMES which he had posted but kept private on a contributory genealogy database you all know of. He said he paid high yearly fees to have just about everything they offered. Further he said that ALL NATIVE AMERICAN ARE RELATED and HE CAN PROVE THAT.
The more he talked the less convinced I became. Besides the task of listing half a million names, I doubted the privacy he claimed to have. Mostly I feared that a lot of people who are lazy genealogy hobbyists or simply ignorant will take his word for it and never bother to do the proofing.
I told him I was a genealogist but he wasn't interested in my story, just impressing me with his.
The tribe he is a member of gave him the card saying he was 5/32nd blood. We all have two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, and 16 great great grandparents, and thirty two great great great grandparents. A simplistic example of how one gets to be 5/32nds Native American would be that five of the 32 great great great grandparents were Native American. But there are other combinations since it's possible that some or all of these many people in his genetics are some part Native American too.
OK, he looked convincingly Native. He had studied the tribe and taken on some of their cultural attributes such as, he said, doing free genealogy research - for those who wouldn't mind their charts also being in his database.
Early in the conversation I'd mentioned preliminary research into the tribes of these two people who say they want to know their heritage. He wanted me to tell them their names. It would not be professional for me to divulge this. I felt put on the spot. I did not.
He went into the restaurant before me and that was the end of the encounter.
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