My origin story has a rich and variable past. I may not be able to get in contact with my mother, but I do know my ancestry. I first saw my mother in a University Nevada of Reno yearbook. My tale is a mystery with a very cloudy journey, but my story is believable. I researched this information from Ancestry.com, and the information my adopted mother gave me.

I am a multiracial child of the Cluff-Johnson parental lineage. I was born in Reno, Nevada on February 27th, 1963 at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. My mother was Carol April Cluff, a graduate of the University of Nevada at Reno. She had a major as an accountant. My mother was a bookkeeper for the new Cal-Neva Club of Reno. My father was Bruce David Johnson who was a Vietnam veteran serving as an Air Force Staff-Sergeant. He and my mother met, and I was born nine months later. My mother was a Caucasian multiracial woman mixed with Hebrew, Greek, German, French, and Scottish.

Our Journey begins in the year of 70 AD after the destruction of Jerusalem. The Roman Legions of General Titus took my ancestors of women and children. Some Greek merchants or slave traders bought my family descendance, and my ancestors became twined into the Greco-Roman culture in Arcadian area of Greece. Then after the fall of the Roman Empire my ancestors became nomadic residents of German culture.

The Cluff family name comes from the Germanic-Old English term cloh. The word cloh means a ravine or steep-sided valley. My family began living as nomad’s in the Southern borders of Eastern Germania kingdom during the eighth through the tenth century. Then somehow my family while roaming in the Western region of the French border. They became a part of the people of the tribes of the Franks. While they lived in the border regions of Gaul and Germany.

Centuries later, my ancestors migrated to the Island of Britain with some Anglo-Saxon tribes in the Medieval era. My ancestors joined later in the eleventh century during invasion of William the Conqueror with the Normandy kingdom. They left England, and they migrated to the eastern part of Britain in the Scottish Highlands in the county of Lanarkshire.

The Cluff’s family split into two groups. One moved to the Lower lands of Scotland as they called themselves MacCluff. Meanwhile, the other Cluff clan became part of the Wales upper class in the county of Denbighshire. I only know that both came to the British Colonies. Miss Hannah Cluff move to Maryland settlement in 1626.

The Kingdom of England dissolved the MacCluff clan while they took their land. This disinheritance happened after the Jacobite Rebellion between 1745-1746. These actions caused the MacCluff clan to leave, because the second Scottish rebellion of the 1745 would mean their death. They left for the British Colonies in the Carolinas near the outer banks. They changed the name back to Cluff.

This is where Carol April Cluff was born in New Bern, North Carolina. After my mother graduated from high school she enrolled into the University of Nevada in Reno. She was about to graduate in 1962. When she was pregnant with me. My mother who was 26 years old at the time, she decided to kept me for six month before she put me up for adoption. From six months to my first birthday I lived with a German woman who was my Foster-mother. She took me into her home. Until I turned thirteen months old the Jones’s adopted me.

Years later, after I got out of the Marine Corps. I had a pseudonym when I first started writing. It was Watchman De’Angelo. Later, I changed my name to Tsaphah, when I heard the voice of the Lord call me Michael Tsaphah. I found out that my Hebrew name meant “watchman” or “to spy on”, which you pronounce Tsafa as sapa, and God gave the name pronounced zafah that name is the plural form of the word watchmen. They’re job title in Israel were men who stood watch over crops and livestock from predators or men who would be on the lookouts for a fortification or garrison bunkers. Sometimes watchmen were prophets of Israel.

My father Bruce David Johnson’s ancestors were now from Ethiopia and Somalia areas from the Nubian tribes of Africa. Many of the Muslim Raiders landed off the coast, and they kidnapped the Nubian tribes. The Dutch Slave traders took the Ethiopian from the Muslim raiding parties to America, and in Texas-Oklahoma Border slaves found themselves. The Chickasaw Native Americans kidnap my father ancestors, because their hatred of the white slave owners.

During the Civil War, the Chickasaws would free their slaves when they travel to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is where the Chickasaw-Freeman-Johnson family came forward in time. Decades later, my father enlisted into the Army-Air Corps that became the United States Air Force. After the Vietnam War my father joined the Milwaukee Police Department, and he received the rank of Captain of the Traffic Department.

When he retired from the police department after he was diagnosis with Colon cancer. Bruce Johnson was born December 3, 1936, and he died on November 22nd, 1989 at age 53. I didn’t inherit ethnic heritage of a Native Americans, because my father wasn’t Native American. However, the Chickasaw-Freeman-Johnson family hide among the Native Americans, and many of the African American became blood-brother.

Because the Chickasaws considered the Negroes to be the Spirit of the Buffalo, because of their dark skin. The ethnic background of half-Chickasaw-half-African American made me understand Michelle “Rizze” Johnson rich heritage, so the children of Bruce Johnson are Bruce David Junior, Michelle, Indigo, and me. I am the oldest of his children, and the only one that isn’t Native American. I found out all of this information when my father’s daughter Rizze Michelle met me at Oral Roberts University. She gave me the history of our father. Because she did the footwork of our father’s side of the family before he died.

Moreover, she showed me a picture of him in he took in 1985. I have his curly hair, chin, and mouth. Now how I met my mother happen one day while I came out of the Reno Police Department back in 1996. I saw my mother holding a 5-year old boy on her hand. How I recognized her all started back when I was a 13 years old. I saw my ethnic information on some papers in my adopted mom’s Lock-box. I asked her who these people were, and she told me that they were my biological parents’ information. While still enlisted in the Marine Corp. I wrote my mother a letter, and I gave her a picture of me, and her two grandchildren Vincent and Phalisha. I sent the letter to the people in Carson City at Department of Vital Statistics and Records.

So, when she saw me it freaked her out, and she ran to her car. As she drove off, I was heartbroken, but at least I saw her for the first time. I later went to the Sparks Library, and they had the UNR yearbooks from 1933-1962, which the date of 1962 was the year she graduated from college. This might be when she dated my father, I thought to myself. I had this information according to the paper on my biological parents my adopted moms gave me.

One time back in 1997, while I was in Atlanta, Georgia at a church meeting. A lady came up to me, and showed me a picture of my mother when she was 20 years old, and she said I look like her best friend named Carol. I showed her my copy of my mother’s picture I had in my wallet.

This is me in a nutshell, a 100% grade A mutt. And I love the richness of my heritage, and I wouldn’t change one ounce of who I am, and what I have become. It isn’t the breed that makes a great pedigree, but the action you create that makes a person great. I thank God every day for my mother giving me life. This Michael Tsaphah reporting for: “The Chronicle.” God bless.