The day I found out that I was the father of over a hundred children!

The good news was that their college tuition had already been paid.

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

Our research into the real history has taken strange turns, but this beats the cake! You will learn about my life as a bottle in a cryothermal cooler, worth several hundred dollars an ounce.

In the period from 2017 to 2019, we were struggling to explain the Scandinavian Bronze Age petroglyphs in northern Georgia and the strange DNA profiles of Southeastern Creeks and Uchees. Uchee families who on family records looked like almost full-blooded Native Americans were showing up with little or no AmerIndian/Siberian DNA! Instead they had pretty much the same DNA as the Windover Pond, Florida People (6000 to 5000 BC) . . . the same DNA profile as the peoples of Scandinavia and NW Russian prior to the arrival of Indo-Europeans. It was western Asiatic mixed with some proto-Caucasians, who looked very much like mixed-blood Native Americans. What’s even more intriguing was that the Windover Pond People and ancestors of the Sami practiced exactly the same burial customs . . . staking fabric wrapped bodies to the bottoms of shallow ponds.

Eastern (Itsate) Creeks, who were the predominant branch of the Creeks in Georgia and western North Carolina, have very different DNA profiles from the Muskogee Creeks, but are very similar to Florida Seminoles. For example, my family does not carry DNA markers, typical of any North American Indian group. Instead, all of my Asiatic DNA is Southern Mesoamerican from Mexico, Panoan from eastern Peru, Sami from Scandinavia and Polynesian. We also have a lot of Finnish, Karolian, pre-Celtic Irish and Basque DNA markers. Upper Creeks are similar, but carry more Tolteca and less Maya DNA.

A confused young woman

I received a comment from a young woman, who asked if I could answer questions from her in private emails. I agreed. Her first email included a photo of her with her newborn son and asked if I had any relatives in the Asheville, NC area? She was trying to find her father. I gulped. That photo looked astonishingly like a colorized version of my mother holding me . . . back in the Stone Age.

The good news was that I had never fooled around in my marriage, even when I my EX was doing every thing possible to encourage me to do so. Late in the marriage, I actually found her bible, hidden behind a false panel in the dining room of our Colonial farmhouse. It was a book called A Woman’s Five Year Plan for Winning at Divorce. It included several chapters on how to torment your husband so he would seek the arms of another woman. Modern Gringas! Don’t you love ’em? LOL

The writer explained that as children, she and her brother were told that their father was a deceased Cherokee chief. Shortly after being told about the birds and the bees as pre-adolescents, her mother had changed the story to: “Their father was a famous Cherokee architect, who had grown up in Asheville, but later moved to Charlotte, NC. Before having any children, he had been critically injured in an auto accident and was in a permanent coma.

Her mother said that she had been his girl friend in Asheville and so obtained permission from the comatose architect’s family to withdraw “vital bodily fluids” from him in order for her to be artificially inseminated. That story changed somewhat, when the writer was in her early twenties. Her mother clarified that the “vital bodily fluids” had been extracted and stored by a fertility doctor in Asheville. Her mother was actually living in another part of the United States at this time, but traveled back to Asheville for AI.

When the young woman’s son was born with a full head of jet black hair, she became suspicious that she had significant Cherokee ancestry . . . enough for she and her son to be enrolled in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. She ordered DNA tests for her husband, son and herself. She was about 12% Native American, but the DNA was from Southern Mexico and Peru. No one could explain that to her until she had read the article in the old People of One Fire Newsletter, which discussed the multiple ancestry of modern American Indians. She was hoping that I could help hear find her father.

I asked her about her background. She said that she had been born and grown up in the Northeast. However, her mother had encouraged she and her brother to attend Georgia Tech. She had bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Biomedical Engineering and now lived in the Atlanta Area. Her husband was also a Georgia Tech engineer. She did say what her brother studied.

I told her that was born in deep Southeast Georgia and had never heard of any “famous Cherokee architects.” I didn’t tell her that I had lived in Asheville for 10 years. I invited her to join our Coweta Creek Tribe, since she certainly had the right DNA, but there were neither financial benefits or costs involved in being a member. I also suggested that she contact the fertility doctor, who treated his mother. The vital bodily fluids could have come from another part of the country. I knew that first I had never been a donor and secondly no reputable doctor would give out the name of the donor.

About a month late, I received another email from the lady seeking her father. She had tricked her mother into giving her the name of the fertility doctor. She had then spent a few days in Asheville. The fertility doctor had retired and refused to talk with her. By asking around other doctor’s offices and Planned Parenthood, she had found out the name of a nurse, who had worked for him.

The nurse remembered the “vital bodily fluids” named “Cherokee Chief.” It was one of their most costly and popular product lines. Well, over 100 babies had been born from it before the supply ran out. The nurse said that it was not from a donor, but from the husband of one of her patients. She said that the husband really was an architect and had eight years of college. He was part Indian, so we assumed it was Cherokee. We kept a picture of the father from a newspaper clipping. He was tall and athletic . . . just the type we could get top dollar for. We got several thousand dollars from a Hollywood actress with black hair, originally from the South . . . also, sold some to a country western singer in Nashville.

The biomedical engineer said that the nurse described their patient as rather wacko. She would openly brag to other patients that she didn’t want any children and was just trying to please her husband until she could divorce him. “She accidentally had a child in college, so one babe was enough for her. They were in a open marriage and so if she got pregnant, she wouldn’t know who the father was, so she was using birth control the whole time that her husband and the insurance company was paying for fertility treatments. She said that her husband was really stupid not to figure that out.“

I told the woman that she might be running up the wrong tree . . . as we say here in the mountains. I asked her if she had considered the possibility that her mother’s first story was the most accurate . . . that she was having an affair with a married man, when she and her brother were born. I told her that I had some friends in Asheville. Give me her mother’s name and I will ask them to ask around to see if there was a American Indian, who had been involved with her mother.

The young woman emailed me her mother’s name and where she had lived in Asheville. Gulp! I knew her mother very well, but didn’t tell her how. We will give her mother the pseudonym of “Nancy.”

And now for the rest of the story

I knew Nancy because she was a friend of a fellow design professional and also attended our Friday night volley ball and potluck dinners. For those of you from Asheville, the Friday Night volley ball crew became the Save Downtown Asheville organization, which stopped the demolition of Downtown.

We were all in our twenties and had plenty of hormones running through our veins. So when Nancy began coming to the farm, when my wife was on “sales trips,” it was very difficult for me to resist, but being the stupid, self-righteous, ridiculously loyal husband, I was, all she could get was a hug and long conversations. She knew she was breaking me down though . . . by constantly reminding me that my wife had told everyone in town that we had an open marriage. Nancy said as long as everyone in town thinks that you are immoral, you might as well have fun. Everyone will forget it when you remarry.

Just at the point, where Nancy had broken all my willpower, she was offered a huge job in another part of the country. She did get a big goodbye kiss out of me. About 2 years later, she showed up in town for a few days. She came up to my office in City Hall and kissed me like we were long time lovers – you know, like in an R Rated movie? If she had done that while in Asheville, I couldn’t have resisted her at all.

Nancy then showed me a photo of her pretty little daughter with black hair and asked me if I had gotten a divorce. I told her, “No, but it’s getting harder and harder. One day she asks me for a divorce then the next day she says that she will destroy me, if I leave her. For my birthday, her only gift was a bicycle inner tube, which exploded about 100 yards down the road, splattering me across the highway.”

Nancy then winked and said, “I know for a fact if you divorce your wife and get a new one, you will quickly have the children that you deserve. This farm would be a wonderful place for them to grow up.” Nancy drove north from Asheville with the Biomedical Engineer’s little brother in her body.

I never heard from my daughter again. I presume that she mentioned my name to Nancy and Nancy freaked out. Life is indeed a box of chocolates.