"Joseph Driggs is Not Josias Drake, Jr." was first published online in December 2008.
The absurd notion that Josias Drake, Jr. baptized on 28 May 1682 at Amersfoort, Long Island, the son of Josias Jansen Drats and Aeltje Brouwer, would emerge after surviving a shipwreck as Joseph Driggs of East Haddam, Connecticut (who died there in 1748), was first introduced in 1959 by Howard R. Driggs in his Driggs Family History (vol.1). In 1971, Driggs Family History Vol. 2, compiled by L. Lynne Driggs and Harry Stoddard Driggs, cautioned about the validity of the claim but did little to dissuade scores of descendants from buying into the story. Even today, one can still find numerous Family Trees posted on Ancestry.com that perpetuate the fable. Fortunately the roll of Driggs family descendants include some skeptics who don't accept everything they read (especially when no evidence is supplied to support the claim). In 2008 one such descendant came forward, provided a verifiable pedigree, and signed up for a Y-DNA test with Family Tree DNA. The results, which are explained in "Joseph Driggs is Not Josias Drake," clearly demonstrate that the descendant of Joseph Driggs is not genetically related to descendants of Josias Jansen Drats (who had also been tested by Family Tree DNA).
In October 2010, Richard W. Davis (a descendant of Joseph Driggs) shared his research which leads to the likely conclusion that Joseph Driggs was of Portuguese ancestry and that the Driggs surname was derived from the surname, Rodrigues. His posts on the Driggs Family Genealogy Forum, dated 10/09/10, 10/10/10, 10/13/10 and 3/21/11, describe his research and should serve as a start for anyone seeking to take on further research into the correct ancestry of the Driggs Family.