Arthur Middleton , one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was some sort of distant relative of mine.
On my father's side, the heritage can be traced back to two brothers that came into the USA before the revolution. One stayed in the USA, and fought in the revolution, the other ended up going into Canada. Oddly enough , both of their linage eventually came to settle back in around Saginaw Michigan in later years. Virtually all the 'Wiltse' families in the USA can be traced back to those two brothers.
One of my distant relatives actually still lives on land that was deeded to him for fighting in the revolution. My parents went to visit them years ago, in upstate New York ( somewhere near the finger lakes area ) , they had a small dairy farm on the land, and have the original deed , signed by George Washington. The more telling part of this in terms of our general relationship with making wise choices, or having good/bad fortune, is the story goes that the person who was deeded the land actually originally had a 1 square mile of land that was located on Long Island NY, he apparently traded it for the 1 square mile of land near the finger lakes. I wonder what a square mile of land on Long Island would be worth today?
Now, for more or less my whole life, I was told that my great great , grandmother was full blood Cherokee , which would make me 1/8th Cherokee. However , my sister through DNA tells me we have no native american blood in us, and that the woman who supposedly was 100% Cherokee, wasn't Cherokee at all... So who knows for sure what the heck is true. I think everything I've said is accurate, but who knows for sure.
One thing I do know for sure, is that one of my grandmothers, came from Czechoslovakia with her family , when she was a very little girl. They settled in the Saginaw Michigan area, where she met my grandpa Wiltse. My mothers side of the family was a pretty good mixture of various European heritages, but most prominently were Irish , with the family name of McKendree
One other thing I have been told, but have no way to verify... is that my wife, has some blood that goes back to the family of Chiang Kai-Shek. With what little I actually know of my wife's family heritage, it's become clear to me that there has to be a lot of very interesting stuff that I may never actually know very well, mainly due to my inability to speak Chinese, but also because as near as I know, not a lot gets spoken of some of the past , for reasons that aren't completely understood by myself, or even my wife to some degree.
