Porter McGhan and the Fluid Nature of Identity

By Dave O.

Family stories are the first history lessons most of us get. And like a lot of history, they’re messy. I grew up being told that my ancestor, Porter McGhan, was a First Nation person—an Indian child adopted into a Scottish immigrant family. That story held a certain reverence in my heart. I was a step-child, adopted, in a fashion, and I was always acutely aware of it. 

But the past doesn’t always sit still. Recent DNA testing suggests that Porter may not have been Indigenous at all—but Corsican. Mediterranean roots, not Native ones. And while that DNA test might change the narrative, it didn’t make me think any less of Porter. In fact, it made me think more about how we define identity—and who gets to draw the lines.

"tintype' portrait of Porter McGhan

A Beginning Without a Clear Origin

Porter’s beginnings were uncertain. Family lore holds that he was abandoned or orphaned as an infant, new to a complicated world from his first breath. His mother died in child-birth. After burying his wife, Porter’s father reportedly abandoned the baby and disappeared into the unknown. As the story goes, Farmer McGhan, himself an immigrant, hearing the plight of the family, walked ten miles and rescued the orphaned baby. McGhan, a man who had come to America not with wealth or pedigree, but with enough grit to build a life from scratch.

That act—of taking in a child, giving him a name, and raising him as his own—wasn’t just a kindness. It was a declaration. In a world obsessed with bloodlines, McGhan built his family differently: with intention, not

inheritance. 

Into the Fire

In May of 1862, as the Civil War escalated, Porter joined the newly formed 17th Michigan Infantry. He was just one of thousands of young men, many of them first generation immigrants, swept into the currents of war. Just weeks after Porter’s enlistment, on August 27, 1862, the regiment boarded trains to Washington, D.C., Their first test came fast: South Mountain on September 14, then Antietam three days later—September 17, 1862. It was the bloodiest single day in American history. Porter was there. And he was wounded.

A wound to his leg, ending his military career just weeks after it had begun. He was sent home on a medical furlough. In January 1863, Porter was discharged in Detroit, the paperwork citing a “gunshot wound - inner and lower aspect of right thigh.” 

We Don’t Get to Look Away

So who was Porter McGhan?

He was a child taken in. A soldier wounded in one of this nation’s bloodiest battles. A man whose life crossed the boundaries of blood, nation, and certainty. He stood when called—not for a narrow idea of heritage, but I'd like to believe, for something larger. For belonging. For future generations. For home.

And now, I look around and wonder what he would think of the country he helped hold together.

Because today, nativist passions are boiling over. What was once billed as a crackdown on dangerous gang members has morphed into a brutal assault on immigrant communities—indiscriminate, inhumane, and escalating. People with legal status are being taken from homes, workplaces, and schools by masked marauders. Families are being torn apart in broad daylight.

We are witnessing children ripped from their parents’ arms. Not by necessity. Not according to law or custom. But by design. And we are expected to call it policy instead of what it is: cruelty.

Maybe it’s because of Porter—because of the uncertainty around his origins, the fragility of his belonging, the debt I feel to those who made space for him—that I can’t see this moment as anything but an assault on humanity itself.

This post is for him. And for every child who doesn’t know if the adults in their life will retun home work tonight. For every parent who crossed a border not to break the law, but to keep a promise, to feed a family. For every American who believes that who we claim and how we treat the most vulnerable is what defines us in the end.

We don’t get to look away. Not if we’ve inherited anything worth keeping.