My Grandmother was a Cherokee Princess!!!
Part 1
© February 1, 2001
One of the hardest areas of genealogy is the tracing of Native American lines. The lack of accurate records has been a large stumbling block for many. The next hurdle to get past is the racist attitudes that our ancestors had to deal with over the years which made many of them hide their ancestry. After you get past these two blockades the next one is our own government's attitude toward the Native American.
Most people that have Native American blood lines have had the information handed down by word of mouth and many times the ancestor that was Native American was a woman. Over the years this ancestor has became some Cherokee Princess who was the daughter of some chief. Well folks I am here to tell you there are no Cherokee Princesses except at the local Pow Wow. If she was the daughter of a chief that is all that she was. The title of Princess is a white invention. Now that I have made everyone mad and have disillusioned all the people that were hoping to prove that they had a connection to a very important line we can get down to how to really make a dent in finding out if the stories that you have been told have any basis in truth.
At least 80% of the time if you have been told that there is Native
American blood lines in your family it is true. The first problem is
determining who the line began with in the white line. Eight out of
ten times it will be the female line that you can not find anything on
including a surname. The best place to start is to determine where
that person was born. The time frame and then do some history research
to see what tribes where in that area at the time of birth. Without an
idea of what tribe you will be spinning your wheels on trying to
locate any information. If you are pretty sure they came from the
southeast you have a pretty good chance that you are tied to one of
the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, or
Seminole). This can be a long process of trying to narrow down the
tribe, but well worth the effort because once you know the tribe you
will know what government records to access since they are kept by
tribe.
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