Panther's Lodge

I have known Donald and Teresa Yates since early  2011. Having used one of their informative DNA testing services, DNAConsultants.com, for various tests, and having read and liked  Donald Yates’s books  “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” and  “Jews and  Muslims in British Colonial America” (co-authored with Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman), and as well having talked in person, and  by phone and email,  with Donald and Teresa,  I have found their intellectual efforts to be stimulating, well-researched,  and valuable. I look forward to the release, scheduled  for this summer, of Donald’s new book (also co-authored with Hirschman) about early Jews and Muslims in England and Wales.

My insight into my own family ancestry has thus been pleasurably expanded. The DNA tests, of myself and  family members, have revealed markers of Mediterranean, Sinti  and Near Eastern ancestry, including probable Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and Native American ancestry as well.

This new information has  exploded  the image of my family tree portrayed to  me as a boy as one with purely northern European roots. A subsequent review of  family naming practices and other information in my well-researched early American ancestry going back to 1638 in Massachusetts, has convinced me  that the picture I have had of my personal genetic inheritance  is fascinatingly  flawed. My understanding—gained through years of public K-12 and college education—of the historical facts of the movement of peoples into and out of England  and other European nations, as well the Americas, seems to have been incomplete.

I anticipate researching my indicated Native American ancestry on this site,  so as to explore more of what I consider to be the admirably positive and enlightening aspects of Native American spiritual practice. The standard facts that we have been presented of the pre-colonial settling of the Americas  seem  simplified and selectively edited. Omitted is explanation of the extensive mounds near the Great Lakes, the unusual artifacts found, the language and cultural similarities between tribes such as the Cherokee and ancient Mediterranean civilizations, and the recorded eye-witness  first impressions by early European settlers, of the yet undisturbed Native American cultures and peoples they encountered—impressions which do not jive with the depiction of Native Americans as ignorant savages.

Many generations later, in far off coastal Washington State, while quite young,  I personally encountered these same negative attitudes about Native American peoples and culture.  While being schooled with Native American youth from a nearby Indian reservation, and observing the palpable disrespect shown them by the power possessors in the education system and elsewhere in the white culture of which I was supposedly a member,  I did not feel entirely comfortable. These matters of the truth of Native American history and culture seem to be explored in detail here on this site, in  books by Donald Yates and others,  books which I have not yet read thoroughly, yet  through some perusal lead me to suspect that a  somewhat similar bogus history of the early pre-colonial settling of the Americas has been promoted in our culture, like what I have come to view as the inaccurate history of the colonial period of the Americas discussed above.

As a result of discovering Donald and Teresa Yates and associates as an information source, my old genetic view of myself has been stood on its head. I applaud. Hurrah for original and courageous true scholarship. If your goal is the truth of your genetic and genealogical past, then I recommend that you try  getting some here.