Every year, the staff of the Fort Worth Branch of the National Archives gets thousands of letters from people all over the United States who are trying to prove that an ancestor was an Indian. These researchers comprise what must be one of the largest "tribes" in North America, the Wantabes. People wantabe an Indian for a variety of reasons but most are not successful in their efforts to find proof and thus join the ranks of another very large "tribe", the Outalucks. Many people fail in their genealogical research because they are not familiar with the records of the Federal government which relate to the American Indian. Hopefully, the following information will help researchers avoid becoming an Outaluck.

Getting Started

As with most genealogical research, the best results are obtained by beginning with yourself and working your way backward in time. It is virtually impossible to begin with Pocahontas and Captain John Smith and work your way forward. With the exception of Emmett Starr's Old Cherokee Families and a few similar works, there are very few published genealogies of famous Indians. There is no computer that will provide you with a list of all Geronimo's descendants.

Interviewing family members, especially at picnics and reunions when they may be in a good mood and willing to talk, often provides enough basic information about names, places of residence, and approximate dates of birth and death to allow you to begin the search.

Finding the Tribe

The first step is to determine what tribe the elusive Indian ancestor was a member of. That sounds simple but many researchers have no idea. In many cases, all they have is an old photograph of someone who "looks like an Indian" or a family legend that says grandmother was an "Indian princess". If you know approximately where the ancestor lived, you can consult The Indian Tribes of North America by John R. Swanton published by the Smithsonian Institution Press. It provides information about the tribes, sub-tribes, bands, etc. which lived in each state. Muriel H. Wright's A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma and W. W. Newcomb, JR's The Indians of Texas are valuable sources of information about the tribes which lived in those areas.

Having decided on a tribe or tribes, the next step is to do some basic homework on the tribal history. The best place to begin is with a good general survey such as William T. Hagan's American Indians, Angie Debo's A History of the Indians of the United States, or Arrell Gibson's The American Indian: Prehistory to the Present. Francis Paul Prucha's A Bibliographical Guide to the History of Indian-White Relations in the United States provides references to studies of specific tribes. The time spent on background reading is worth the effort because it will help you evaluate the accuracy of the family legends. You'll realize, for example, that there is something wrong with the story that you're great-grandfather was a Cherokee who lived in Michigan in 1850.

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