Met a distant half cousin-in-law winter before last. He had sent out a letter with pics and ancestry info to as many Mader/Moder descendants of great great great great great grandpa and his first and second wives, who settled in a "staunch" German Lutheran farm area in NW Ohio. He lived on what was left of the farm where the original log cabin with attached barn still stood. His wife was a descendant and he had to sell most of what land he had for her cancer treatments, a battle she lost. He took us to one of the cemeteries to show us where "Civil War George" Mader, who as it turns out was the son of the first mentioned grandpa's first wife and not grandpa's. This info had not been passed down our way previously, but the cousin had taken photos of the church records that declared the first wife to have an "illegitimate" boy child when she crossed the Atlantic with great great great great great grandpa, only the language wasn't quite that kind. Her maiden name spelling placed her family in a certain European area to where Germanians (somewhere in what was once Germania) had escaped one of the old wars and were identified as such by the spelling. For over 55 years, I was born a Mader/Moder descendant, only to find out I wasn't! My grandpa Moder, a skilled worker, and his only wife had one son and then he was drafted into WWII in his late 20's and sent to the Battle of the Bulge where is was killed by Germans.
My maternal side of German Lutherans definitely has some dark olive pigment, but I don't know if that will show up in an ancestry DNA test, I haven't tried one. It shows up strong in my grandmother's one brother in pics and her one daughter, whose father, my grandfather, was a pale West Virginian Irish United Brethren. He and my grandmother were apparently quite the comedy on Sunday mornings when he turned on the radio and sang along to his hillbilly gospel, told by my mom's surviving twin (a UB parishioner). They met while she was playing piano in a UB church in the big city where the younger crowd headed for jobs in the 30's. She was also a part-time nanny for room/board while attending a business school. My grandma didn't go to church until after he passed at 57 from a heart attack and she got a driver's license and a car! My "granny go-go" picked me up every Sunday morning for as long as I can remember and drove to the nearest Lutheran church where she played piano. My paternal grandma apparently went agnostic because of the war and passed that down, so my mother rarely attended church. Her mother had died not long after her youngest sister was born and it's clear they were far from well off. Only the boys went to live with her parents on a farm, the oldest sister stayed at home to cook and the younger ones were taken to the county children's home then apparently sent to different families as house girls, something she never mentioned. We only learned about her childhood after her death and were able to verify from records that still existed. I cringe to think what she may have gone through. Having ultimately ended up in the big city, when she met my grandpa it had to be the best time of her life.
DH's kin claims a Cherokee woman in their ancestry, but no one has been able to show me any evidence of the claim, although there were and are hoards of his Irish/Scottish/English surname in the Appalachians, particularly eastern Tennessee. (I miss the days when there were phone books in lodging rooms divulging such info.)
Unlike in my formative years, I find ancestry and migration history and tribulations that went with it fascinating. Knowing now that I've got a lost link and at least a part of me is not who I thought I was is kind of sad, but of course I'm not alone.
I've enjoyed reading your histories and thoughts, thanks all!