 According to the family's oral tradition, her mother had some Cherokee ancestors, although researchers have found no concrete evidence of this to date.Ancestry.com announced on July 30, 2012, that by using a combination of old documents and yDNA analysis her mother's family may be descended from African John Punch, who was an indentured servant then slave in seventeenth-century colonial Virginia.The DNA evidence suggests that Punch was of Sub-Saharan origin, possibly from Cameroon.