On his maternal side, Maggid ben Yoseif hails from mixed Tsa-la-gi (Cherokee) who are believed to have fled North Carolina as part of the Old Settlers movement before the Cherokee removal called The Trail of Tears. These Cherokee included the "keepers of the fire" who fled to the mountains and hills of Tennessee and migrated from there into Arkansas, Southeastern Oklahoma and the Ark-La-Tex area where ben Yoseif was born in 1952 at the town closest to "Three States" in Caddo Parish, La.

He only recently learned that his paternal ancestry is Eurasian royalty. ben Yoseif is a direct descendant of King Charles I (Charlemagne), the king of the Franks and first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and the royal families of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Britain, Normandy, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and all of Eurasia dating to 20 C.E.

The connection to European royalty was discovered this past summer ('07) during his cross-country trek from the Rockies to represent the Eastern Gate of the Sacred Four Corners at the Native commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement. He did so with the blessing of Apache spiritual leaders and a Hopi medicine man.

Ada Fasthorse, who is the greatest granddaughter of Geronimo, asked me to deliver a note to the White House asking for the return of her grandfather's skull and bones and the skulls and bones of other young Apaches, which have been used in an unclean ritual at Yale University. The President's grandfather, Prescott Bush led a raiding party that dug up Geronimo and the other Apache youths. Since both presidents Bush had been members of this elite and highly secretive Skull and Bones society, and 400 years of European-Native relations had now passed, the Apache nation thought the time was appropriate to request these bones so that Geronimo could complete his journey and the Apache curse against the Bush family -- which has attached itself to this nation through the Bush presidencies -- could be ended.  As Ada worded it, the remains must be "returned in a sacred manner before the curse gets much worse."

In his last words to me before the hospitalization that resulted in his death, my late father, Dell Sr., of most blessed memory, said that while I was in Virginia that I should look up his mother's ancestry, the Westmorelands.

After delivering that note, ben Yoseif said he attempted to do so.  However, the birth, death and marriage records in all of the counties where the Westmorelands had lived in Virginia -- King George, Prince George, Dinwiddie and Brunswick -- had been burned during the War Between The States.  It looked hopeless.

Then ben Yoseif said he met a man from Scotland at one of the campgrounds where he had stayed while trying to get an appointment with his congressional representatives for their help in getting the note to the president.

He was familiar with the Virginia State Library and told me to try that resource in Richmond. There I found a copy of a will that had survived the County courthouse fires and made the connection to a direct paternal Westmoreland ancestor who had changed his name.  Richard Westmoreland was born Richard Neville, earl of Westmoreland.  When he and his descendants came to the colonies, they chose the province of his title as their last name.

ben Yoseif said during a subsequent trip to Utah in November '07, he was invited to speak to a group of  followers of the Book of Mormon -- which Mormons believe documents a family of Joseph descended from Laman ben Lehi ben M'nashe ben Yoseif. At a meeting arranged for him in Manti, UT, he learned that the maiden name of the lady who hosted the meeting was also Westmoreland and that they were distant cousins with a common ancestry.  However, she had been unsuccessful in tracing their ancestry beyond a "Reeves Westmoreland." ben Yoseif told her about the connection to the Neville family line.

Two days later she brought me my ancestral tree brimming with hundreds of royalty dating to 20 C.E. that included the late 8th Century Merovingian line of Charlemagne -- kings, queens, princes, princesses, mayors of palaces -- and including the very first kings of Scotland.  If my Dad had lived, we were planning to make a trip to Scotland, which always had held a fascination with him and me.

What does all of this mean?   ben Yoseif cites the admonition of the prophet Jeremiah who told the House of Israel to set up waymarks or signs along the way of their exile, so that the same way in which they were scattered they might return.  As it happens, this spread of royalty across Europe closely correlates with the Cimmerian migrations out of Asia Minor and across Eastern and Western Europe.

(ben Yoseif teaches that "Cimmerians" are the Anglicized name of  the Kymri-Gomeri.  The latter is the name found in Assyrian manuscipts describing the House of 'Omri,  'Omri was one of the kings of the non-Jewish Northern Tribes called the House of Israel who because of his military might, earned the respect of the Assyrians. However, as ben Yoseif explains the research of Jewish scholar, Yohanan Hevroni ben David (John Hully), who he befriended in Jerusalem, the name begins with a difficult to pronounce "ayin."  This letter is usually pronounced phonetically by non-native speakers as a "g" as in the Gaza Strip and Sodom and Gomorrah, which also begin with this same gutteral).

ben Yoseif said he plans to contact the castles of the British Isles and Western and Eastern Europe, from which his father's ancestry hails to seek help in "retrenching" the message of the Return of the House of Joseph in the British Isles and across Europe.

This is a huge undertaking and I'm not sure how far "we" -- I would not think of attempting this alone -- can get with it, but I believe it is important to begin the retrenching.

He is also hoping that this tie to royalty through his late grandmother may gain renewed respect for her memory.  Westmoreland Lane, was a buggy road named after her in the 1800s. It is his only access to 22 acres near Bright Star, AR, which was her homestead and which is where he plans a Native American spiritual resources center and the Maude Etta Westmoreland Memorial House of Joseph Torah Academy. However, the road was taken off of the Miller County maps after a "neighbor" fenced in the right-of-way making it impossible to widen for access.