This work is a small jaunt into the past, our deep history, using re-cent genetic advances, historic archival records, and recent scholarship to explore certain aspects of my personal heritage. While I have writ-ten extensively on one of the 'smallest' of the many ancestries that make up my identity, that of my maternal Muscogee Creek Indian forebears, herein I examine my more prevalent ancestral ties to the British Isles, a region where the great majority of my ancestors hailed from originally before coming to North America hundreds of years ago. Previous works investigated the integration of "Indian Countryman", (most often Scots, Irish, and others) into the Indian tribes of the southeast through intermarriage, and the mixed blood families that descended from them like my mother's Hill, Doyle, and Islands line-ages. They founded large extended kin networks that remain in many tribes' influential centuries later. While Indian is the smallest of ances-tries I have genetically (.02 percent), my DNA reveals the great amount of ancestry of various ethnicities from the British Isles that I have, which composes the largest part of my genome (well over 90 percent).
Such facts might surprise many mainstream Americans to learn, yet I am not very different from most of the over 80,000 enrolled members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, or the over 400,000 en-rolled members of the Cherokee Nation, where I have lived for years. After many centuries of intermarriage most members of these south-eastern tribes have predominately European ancestry, (as well as more African than many would guess) yet these tribal communities are vi-brant, even growing in social clout and political strength in the first quarter of the 21st century, as I have observed them again prospering after generations of political oppression and social marginalization in Oklahoma.
After having written well over a dozen books on just such areas of inquiry in my quest to better understand identity as a social con-struct, I felt it apropos to investigate that great portion of my ancestry from Britain through using the surnames of the most recent genera-tions to better understand the history of the British Isles from whence they came. Most of my ancestral surnames reflect the many waves of peoples who came throughout the ages to the British Isles and con-tributed their genetic legacy, their linguistic and cultural offerings, a legacy that through time became a global diaspora in the hundreds of millions.
