Hey Y'alls, Long time no hear. I've been away from my desk muy mucho this Summer, researching my ancestral history as it were. It all started when I casually mentioned the fact that I was one-sixteenth Native American to a friend of mine. Dude! She said. You have native rights as such, you should look into it. Perhaps! I said, but that road was pretty much barricaded by my father's maternal grandfather the staunch, WW1 Army Captain and American Federalist Party Member and primary father-figure to my dad, Roland Willis. You see, a million years ago, my Great-Grandfather Earl Gilbert Seely ran off at age 16 to join in the Klondike Gold Rush, from his home in Southern California. He and 100,000 other 'would be prospectors' of whom 30,000 arrived and 4,000 found gold, stampeded north in search of their fortunes. Old 'Dad' Seely never struck gold be he found himself a beautiful wife, my Great Grandmother Bessie Wyatt Seely. She was half French-Canadian and half Aleut Alaskan Native. Earl (great Grandpa) and Bessie (great grandma) moved back to So. Cal. in 1901 where they were pretty much ostracized by the Old World Seelys, but together they built a good long life, raising their twin children, the boy of whom was my dad's dad, Earl Jr. Earl Jr. married the daughter of Capt. Roland Willis (Patty Willis/Seely) and together they failed at building a good long life together, divorcing when my dad was 11 or 12. Captain Roland Willis hoped to completely erase the memory of the Seely debacle (as did the other Seelys, they being my dad's Uncle and Aunt and Cousins) by pulling strings with his military connections to have all traces of Bessie Wyatt's birth records expunged, allegedly in the form of a single hand-written certificate in Dawson City AK that Roland used to light one of his ubiquitous stogies with. And the rest as they say, is history.
