“My Grandma Was an Indian” (And She Might Have Been Right) Maybe…

You’ve probably heard it. Maybe at Thanksgiving, maybe from an auntie who said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Your great-grandma was Indian.” The high cheekbones. The “good hair.” The way she’d go quiet sometimes and look at something nobody else could see.

And then you take a DNA test, and nothing. Or worse, it says “East Asian” or “Southeast Asian” or “Indigenous Americas, less than 1%,” and you’re sitting there wondering if someone made the whole thing up.

Maybe they didn’t. But maybe the story is more complicated than anyone knew to tell.

Why the DNA Tests Can’t Always Find It

Here’s the first thing to understand: commercial DNA tests are not magic. They work by comparing your genetic markers to reference panels, curated databases of people with known, documented ancestry from specific regions. The larger and more diverse the reference panel for a given population, the more accurately the algorithm can identify that ancestry in your results.

And here’s the problem: those reference panels are deeply uneven. European ancestry is extremely well-represented. That is why AncestryDNA can tell you whether your English roots are from the East Midlands or the North East. That level of granularity exists because of large, well-documented samples. But Native American populations, particularly Eastern Woodland tribes, are significantly underrepresented. Most of the Indigenous American reference samples used by major testing companies come from Western and Southwestern tribes, or from Mexico and South America. The Algonquian-speaking nations of the Eastern Seaboard (Nanticoke, Lumbee, Piscataway, Powhatan, Pequot, and others) are barely represented at all.

This matters enormously for African Americans with family roots in Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Delaware. The Indigenous people your ancestors actually encountered and intermarried with, the Eastern Woodland peoples, are the exact ones the tests struggle most to detect.

And that’s before we even get to the genetics of recombination. Every generation, you inherit only 50% of each parent’s DNA, selected at random. Go back five or six generations, and there’s a real statistical chance you simply didn’t inherit your Native ancestor’s distinctive markers at all, even if that ancestor was absolutely real. The DNA doesn’t lie, but it also doesn’t tell the whole truth; it only reports what it received.

So if your results came back light on Indigenous ancestry, that doesn’t mean your family was making things up. It might mean the test can’t see what’s there. It might mean the DNA wasn’t passed to you specifically. Or it might mean something else entirely, something that takes a little more history to understand.

The Other Possibility: She Might Have Been Malagasy

This is where the story gets genuinely wild, and where the history of the slave trade opens up in ways most people never learned in school.

Madagascar is a large island off the southeastern coast of Africa, and its people (the Malagasy) are one of the most genetically distinctive populations on earth. Unlike the peoples of mainland Africa, the Malagasy descend from two completely separate migration streams: Bantu-speaking East Africans and, remarkably, Austronesian peoples from maritime Southeast Asia, most likely from what is now Borneo and Indonesia. This dual ancestry is why the Malagasy language is more closely related to languages spoken in Southeast Asia than to any African language. It’s why Malagasy people can carry genetic markers that look, to a commercial DNA test, like “Southeast Asian” or “East Asian” ancestry. And it’s why some of their descendants in America were described as looking different, lighter in complexion, with straighter or wavier hair and high cheekbones, from other enslaved Africans around them.

You can probably see where this is going.

The Madagascar-to-Virginia Pipeline

Most Americans, even those deeply engaged in genealogical research, don’t know that there was a documented, specific slave trade route from Madagascar directly to the American colonies. But there was.

Between 1670 and 1698, an unknown number of Malagasy enslaved people were dispatched to New York; between 1716 and 1721, around 1,500 Malagasy captives were shipped to Virginia and sold there. The ships had names. The voyages are documented. A search of ships arriving in North America between 1678 and 1721 revealed seven ship disembarkations with a total of 1,922 enslaved people from Madagascar landing in Virginia alone.

This was not a fringe operation. Robert “King” Carter was the major investor in the Madagascar-to-Virginia slave trade, as well as the major purchaser of the enslaved Malagasy who arrived in the Tidewater region. Carter was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in colonial Virginia. These were not random, scattered arrivals, they were deliberate commercial voyages organized by the Virginia planter class.

Between 1719 and 1721, 1,400 people from Madagascar were imported into Tidewater, Virginia, a very large number for three years. It works out that almost every 22nd or 25th captive in that region during that period would have been of Malagasy origin. That’s not a trace ancestry; that’s a significant community presence in colonial Virginia, one that history largely erased.

Malagasy enslaved people also arrived in Charleston, South Carolina during this same period, as planters from Barbados were among the original settlers of Charleston and certainly would have brought their Malagasy enslaved with them. A form of rice called “Carolina Gold” originated in Madagascar and was brought to Charleston in the 1680s. These enslaved Malagasy would have arrived with rice production skills that were highly valued in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

After the slave trade from Madagascar officially closed, those 1,500 or so Virginian Malagasy were absorbed into the larger enslaved population. Their descendants were sold south, moved west, and scattered across the cotton belt. Their names were changed or forgotten. Their origin was erased. But their DNA, particularly that distinctive Southeast Asian component, survived in their descendants’ genomes.

“She Was a Molly Gasca Negro”

Here’s what makes this theory more than speculation: the oral history of Malagasy descendants in America is remarkably consistent, and it sounds a lot like “my grandma was Indian.”

A posting on the AfriGeneas African-Native American Genealogy Forum described someone seeking information on the “Matagascan / Malagascan / Matogascan Creek Indians” because family lore claimed that her great-great-grandmother was from this “Indian” tribe. Another commenter wrote: “My mother’s father always described his mother as being a full blooded Malagaskan Indian woman with long black hair down her back.”

How to Investigate Your Own Family Story

And then there’s this, from a WPA slave narrative, a formerly enslaved man named James Brittain of Mississippi, speaking about his grandmother: “My grandma came from Virginia… When my grandma died she was one hundred and ten years old. She said she was a Molly Gasca negro. That was the race she belonged to. She sure did look different from any of the rest of us. Her hair was fine as silk and hung down below her waist.”

“Molly Gasca.” “Malagascan.” “Matogascan.” These are corrupted phonetic versions of “Malagasy”, passed down through generations of oral tradition by people who knew something was different about their grandmother, even if the word for it had been mangled almost beyond recognition. They didn’t have the history books. They didn’t have DNA tests. They had the memory of a woman who looked different and came from somewhere else. And they held onto it.

The physical descriptions of enslaved Malagasy consistently include references to their lighter complexion, straighter hair, and cultural background that set them apart from other enslaved Africans. In a world where racial categories were rigidly policed, a Malagasy woman with Southeast Asian features and straight hair could easily have been remembered, or misremembered, as “Indian.”

But What About the Real Native American Ancestry?

Here’s where I want to be clear: I’m not saying the “Indian grandma” stories are always Malagasy. I’m not saying Native American ancestry in African American families is a myth. For many families, particularly those with roots on the Delmarva Peninsula, in the Virginia Tidewater, in the Carolinas, and along the Eastern Seaboard, it is absolutely documented and real.

My own family is a case in point. My maternal line traces directly to Aminadab Handsor, born 1648, a documented Nanticoke man of Delaware. That is not family lore, it is a paper trail. The Nanticoke were one of the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the Delmarva Peninsula, and my documented ancestry from that line runs in an unbroken chain from 1648 to 1989. My AncestryDNA results show 1% Indigenous Americas, which, given the reference panel limitations discussed above, almost certainly reflects this ancestry, even in its underestimated form.

African and Native American communities in the colonial South lived in close proximity for centuries. Many enslaved Africans escaped to Indigenous communities. Many Indigenous people were themselves enslaved or displaced onto the same land. Free Black and Native families intermarried, particularly in places like the Delmarva Peninsula, coastal Virginia, coastal North Carolina, and the Georgia-South Carolina border. This history is real, and the DNA, however imperfectly, reflects it.

The point isn’t to replace one story with another. The point is to hold them both, to understand that “my grandma was Indian” could mean a documented Algonquian ancestor, or a Malagasy woman whose Southeast Asian heritage registered as something “different,” or both, across different branches of the same family tree. Our histories are that layered. Our ancestors were that complicated.

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If you’ve got a “grandma was Indian” story in your family and you want to actually dig into it, here are the angles worth pursuing:

• Check for Southeast Asian DNA. If your results show even a trace of Southeast Asian, East Asian, or “Indigenous Americas” DNA, and your family has roots in Virginia, Maryland, or the Carolinas, Malagasy ancestry is a legitimate hypothesis worth exploring.

• Look at where your Virginia/Carolina ancestors were. If enslaved ancestors appear in Tidewater Virginia, the York River corridor, the Rappahannock, or the South Carolina Lowcountry in the early 1700s, those are exactly the entry points for the documented Malagasy slave trade.

• Check mtDNA haplogroups. Certain mitochondrial haplogroups, particularly haplogroup M, are associated with Southeast Asian and Malagasy ancestry and can be identified through dedicated mtDNA testing at FamilyTreeDNA.

• Search the slave narratives. The WPA Slave Narrative Collection, available through the Library of Congress, contains firsthand accounts from formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Listen for corrupted place names: “Molly Gasca,” “Malagascan,” “Matogascan.” These are signals hiding in plain sight.

• For genuine Native American ancestry, pursue the paper trail. DNA alone is insufficient. If you believe you have documented Native ancestry,