And that's the percentage! The article is dealing with raw numbers. The US population at large grew 9.7% between 2000 and 2010 (http://www.census.gov/2010census

And that's the percentage! The article is dealing with raw numbers. The US population at large grew 9.7% between 2000 and 2010 (http://www.census.gov/2010census/data/apportionment-pop-text.php http://www.census.gov/2010census/data/apportionment-pop-text...). So it would be expected that a given subset of that population would also increase by about that amount. A further confound is that you can not know that you had Cherokee ancestry in 2000, but discover that in the next ten years. I'd think this would be especially true during the rise of internet-based ancestry research tools.