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My family has an amusing story about a link to Indian blood lines, too.

When my mother and her brother were both pre-school age, my grandmother’s youngest brother brought his fiancee home to meet the family. Paul worked for the RR and travelled a good bit (so did several of his brothers and father), and met his fiancee somewhere in the NJ piney region. I mean Paul’s family was not exactly urbane and sophisticated, but his new bride was even more unsophisticated (if you know the Jersey Pines region, you can imagine).

Well, Paul’s mother assembled as many of the family as could make it to greet the new bride to be and scared her to death. She showed up in braids and a very plain dress. Not knowing how to act, she gravitated to the youngest children present and put on an act to entertain them, telling them that she was a full blooded Indian and that was why her hair was in braids. She did hand stands and cart wheels and jumped around doing her version of Indian dances.

My uncle believed that Gertie was a full blooded Indian his whole life and passed the story on to anyone who would listen. My sister and I believed what he said and it wasn’t until I ran into her grandson on a genealogy web site that I found out it wasn’t true, The last time that I saw my uncle, he was 90 and brought up the story of Gertie being a full blooded Indian, once again and I told him that it wasn’t true. The look on his face was so sad that I knew that I should have let him go on believing it.