Another DNA Testing Tale…
Here:
Vaughn Pedersen recently received some family news he’s been waiting at least six years to hear. For him, it was a matter of history finally being set straight.
“This was quite a present,” the Elgin resident said.
Pedersen is a sixth-generation descendant of the Shawnee Indian chief known as Blue Jacket. Legend had it that Blue Jacket was a white man, Marmaduke (Van) Swearingen, who, after being captured by the Shawnee, joined them in their struggle against white settlement. The story goes he was thus named because of the coat he wore at the time of his capture.
But new DNA evidence shows almost certainly that Blue Jacket was in fact an American Indian and not white, as the myth had it.
