Native American ancestry?
A Native-American great-great-great-grandmother?

    The tale of Native-American ancestry is (seemingly) nearly ubiquitous for American families of any
antiquity in the New World.  My family is no exception to this.  Before she passed away, my maternal
grandmother
told me stories concerning her claimed Native ancestry.  Her own mother claimed to be
either 1/4 or 1/8 Indian (Grandma couldn't remember which figure she used).

    If Grace Marie (Searl) Tucker was indeed 1/4 or 1/8 Native American, one of her grandparents
or great-grandparents was Native.  Her grandparents were Rowland Searl (b. 1807 in MA, parents
John Searl and Eunice ___), Mary Anne Rogers (b. c1815 in NY, adopted as a child, parentage
unknown), Samuel J. Lockwood (b. c1815 in NY, parentage unknown), and Polly Storrs (b. c1820
in OH, parents Libeus Storrs and Anna Harris).  All four are listed as "white" in the census records in
which they appear, though that is not always reliable.  The first three have enough gaps in their known
ancestry that any one of them could be the ancestor that Grandma's mother had in mind.  However, if
the story is true, the most likely candidate seems to be Mary Anne Rogers.  Besides the fact that she
was adopted and of (to her descendants) unknown parentage, a picture of her exists which would
appear to support the idea that she may not have been entirely of European descent:

                               
                                        Mary Anne (Rogers) Searl, c1815-1889


    As further evidence of her Native descent, Grandma was wont to recount how a Native-American
soldier who served with one of her brothers (Jay D. Tucker), when viewing photographs of his family,
did not believe that one of the other brothers was indeed related, saying "That guy's an Indian!" or words
to that effect.  I do not know which brother he had in mind (either George David Tucker or James Kurtis
Tucker), or which picture, but below are three family portraits--the first with Grandma (on the bottom left)
and her four siblings, the second with the five children and both parents, and the third with the parents (at
their 40th wedding anniversary party) and all of their children except Jay: