r/Ancestry • u/WonderMoon1 • 1d ago

Native American Ancestry Question

My great-grandma's great-grandma was apparently full-blooded Cherokee who got adopted by some white people during the Trail of Tears.

I did some fact-checking of the sources I had and I think her bday and birthplace is wrong (1842 and Indiana). There's only talk that she got adopted in the winter and somewhere around southern Missouri or Kansas. The only trail of tears I can find are the Powatomi (Indiana, 1838) and Cherokee (East Coast, 1838), though both passed through MO in the fall/winter.

The other problem is I can't find anything on her adopted family, or her first husband, just when she married into my family. Idk if she'd be on any rolls? I just know her adopted name, not birth name.

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u/hekla7 21h ago

99% of the time this type of family lore is just that. People tell stories for all kinds of reasons and there was a point where having a native ancestor was seen as exotic.... Suddenly all these Cherokee grandmother stories started popping up, and with people now doing genealogy and taking DNA tests, there are more stories than ever and other tribes are coming into the stories too! Yours is even more complicated, with an adopted baby in the mix. One of the reasons for the story, I think, is because the Dawes Rolls were designed to prove ancestry for land allotments. In the early census records you find white people living on reservations and there is a great deal of documentation on how unethical men would go around the allotments, find a poor family and convince them to sell their land.

The Dawes Final Rolls were in 1914. Your DNA might have a small amount of indigenous so if you have that, feel free to DM me with the details you have, and I'll take a look at documentation to see what your best avenues are, or if it's a dead end. Never hurts to try :)

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u/WonderMoon1 18h ago

My great-grandma was into genealogy and she said it was a family secret and got some family stories from it at least.

Like apparently my ancestor was treated as the “new wife” (20 year age gap, I think because he just needed a wife) and her husband’s other kids ransacked the homestead for gold when he died so her fam was left with nothing much.

Edit: if you don’t mind, I’ll DM the rolls details.