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Welcome to Native American Indian Genealogy
You are invited to share
your American Indian lineages with the world
through a new Ancestral
Database.
Many Indian families never
enrolled in government-recognized or organized
tribes. There are, today, communities of Indian
and mixed-blood people who have been in place
since before the Removals of the 1830’s in the
United States. More families, however, were
dispersed to all parts of the country,
especially to the south central states. At this
time, there must be millions of descendants of
American Indians, spread throughout the world.
The “Story” of Indian
Blood in a Family
Many of the descendants of
these tribes know they have Indian heritage;
many do not. Most times, the story of the Indian
ancestry was a closely-held secret; whispered
from a death bed or as a warning to children
going out to play, never to speak of it.
Sometimes, the families were proud of the
heritage but could never find a way to be
included in tribal lists and enrollments.
Probably the most prevalent situation for
families cut off from their home tribes was the
marriage of Indian women to white men who took
them away from the home places. There was also
the situation where mixed blood families, seeing
the devastating results of the Cherokee Trail of
Tears and other forced Indian removals, vowed
never to come under the hand of the government
as did their friends and relatives
“incarcerated” in the Indian Territory and on
other reservations. So, they never even tried to
join or associate with a tribe.
Times Have Changed
Since the advent of the
Civil Rights movement, the attitudes of American
families have changed toward persons of color,
including those of Indian heritage. Once hidden
references are, now, more openly made,
concerning native roots in families. Along with
this, and the growth of interest in genealogy,
great numbers of mixed blood persons are looking
back toward their native ancestry. Some seek
these roots as a way of gaining acceptance in
tribes; some, for monetary reasons; some, for
health reasons; some, for the simple love of
knowing more about the lives and faces of their
kindred dead.
Over
the past forty years, interest in Indian
heritage has blossomed so much that there are
many groups of individuals forming new Indian
tribes and attempting acceptance by Congress.
Few such groups are successful, but the effort
and the exercise of the Indian culture are
important and valuable. Many artifacts, customs
and traditions have been preserved by the
efforts of these willing devotees.
A New Native Database
The use of the computer
has been very important in all fields of
genealogy, including Indian heritage.
Genealogies once kept by a village historian as
knots on a length of rawhide, are now bytes in a
database. As researchers, we would love to see a
database of all the other researchers who are
looking for Indian family lines. Why? Because,
while many will never find approval from
Congress, we still have a legitimate claim to
our Indian heritage, whether recorded and
documented; or, simply, passed along in oral
tradition. We just want to know.
Gedcom or Lineal Sketch
Sharing
This new database, will,
we hope, help many to connect with Indian
cousins and ancestors to speed up the
repatriation of our modern selves with our
Indian pasts. You can share your documented
histories as well as your oral histories here.
You can share your family details through Gedcom
files, or just lineage sketches. It’s up to you.
The hope is that your claim to Indian heritage
will be joined by your new-found cousins and
result in more information and success in
proving the lineages; or that your lineage might
provide a vital missing link for someone else;
or that a combination of many lineages, when
analyzed, would show the existence of a band in
a certain place over many generations.
Our
goal is not only to find our Indian heritage,
but, also, to document it. We encourage all to
be as accurate as possible in presenting their
lines; to clearly indicate proof as well as
assumption. Your contribution will be carefully
analyzed for obvious and obscure matches with
the lineages of possible relatives, ancestors
and cousins. Let’s get started, shall we?
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