UpFront with NGS: Native American

Showing posts with label Native American. Show all posts

02 November 2016

Let's Celebrate Native American Heritage Month + Fold3 FREE Access to its Native American Records

Let's Celebrate Native American Heritage Month + Fold3 FREE Access to its Native American Records

The Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum join in paying tribute to the rich ancestry and traditions of Native Americans via a dedicated webpage.

You can read the President’s proclamation here.

The US Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs provides some history about this celebration.

Some resources you might consult to assist your research into your Native
American ancestry include …

· American Indian Online Genealogy Records (FamilySearch Wiki)

· American Indian Records in the National Archives

· Tracing Native American Family Roots (National Indian Law Library)

· American Indian Records (Ancestry.com ($))

· Native American (Cyndi’s List)

· Native American Genealogy – Indian Ancestors (About.com, Kimberly Powell)

· FREE ACCESS (1-15 November) Native American Collection (Fold3 ($))

If you have Native American ancestry, share something about that with us?

What have you found to be great resources for researching your Native American Ancestry?

Editor’s Note: Read past posts on Upfront with NGS regarding Native Americans here.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Republication of UpFront articles is permitted and encouraged for non-commercial purposes without express permission from NGS. Please drop us a note telling us where and when you are using the article. Express written permission is required if you wish to republish UpFront articles for commercial purposes. You may send a request for express written permission to UpFront@ngsgenealogy.org. All republished articles may not be edited or reworded and must contain the copyright statement found at the bottom of each UpFront article.

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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02 November 2015

FREE Access to Fold3 Native American Collection (1-15 November 2015)

Think you have Native American ancestry? Check out the Native American Collection at Fold3. FREE access through November 15^th2015!

... Then explore Fold3’s Native American Collection for free November 1-15.

Titles in this collection include:

§ Ratified Indian Treaties (1722-1869): Ratified treaties that occurred between the United States government and American Indian tribes. Also included are presidential proclamations, correspondence, and treaty negotiation expenses.

§ Indian Census Rolls (1885-1940): Census rolls submitted annually by agents or superintendents of Indian reservations as required by an 1884 Act of Congress. Only persons who maintained a formal affiliation with a tribe under Federal supervision are listed on these census rolls.

§ Dawes Packets: Applications between 1896 and 1914 from members of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes to establish eligibility for an allotment of land in return for abolishing their tribal governments and recognizing Federal law.

§ Dawes Enrollment Cards (1898-1914): Enrollment cards, also referred to as “census cards,” prepared by the staff of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, commonly known as the Dawes Commission. The cards record information provided by applications submitted by members of the same family group or household and include notations of the actions taken.

§ Eastern Cherokee Applications (1906-1909): Applications submitted for shares of the money that was appropriated for the Eastern Cherokee Indians by Congress on June 30, 1906.

§ Enrollment of Eastern Cherokee by Guion Miller (1908-1910): The Guion Miller Roll is perhaps the most important source for Cherokee genealogical research. There are an estimated 90,000 individual applicants from throughout North America included within this publication.

§ Cherokee Indian Agency, TN (1801-1835): The records of the agent of Indian Affairs in Tennessee, including correspondence, agency letter books, fiscal records, records of the Agent for the Department of War in Tennessee, records of the Agent for Cherokee Removal, and miscellaneous records.

§ Rinehart Photos – Native Americans (1898): Photographs of over 100 Native Americans taken by Frank A. Rinehart, a commercial photographer in Omaha, Nebraska. Rinehart was commissioned to photograph the 1898 Indian Congress, part of the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition.

Did you find something neat?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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25 July 2014

Upfront Mini Bytes – Adoption, Chicago, Tribal Maps, Odd French Linguistics, Surname Distribution, Tips for Reading Old Handwriting, Historic Photos, and Digitized Australian Newspapers

Editor’s Note: After a brief moratorium, Upfront Mini Bytes are back!

Welcome to our newest edition of our periodic feature Upfront Mini Bytes. In Upfront Mini Bytes we provide eight tasty bits of genealogy news that will help give you a deeper byte into your family history research. Each item is short and sweet. We encourage you to check out the links to articles, blog posts, resources, and anything genealogical!

We hope you found the past editions helpful. Use your favorite search engine with “Upfront with NGS” “Mini Bytes” or use this Google search link.

Do you have questions, suggestions for future posts, or comments? Please post a comment or send an e-mail to UpFront@ngsgenealogy.org.

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The Adoption History Project has a neat online archive. Many in our family history community are adopted or are researching adoptions involving ancestors. It has subsections labeled: Timeline, People & Organizations, Adoption Studies/Science, Topics in Adoption History, Further Reading, and Document Archives. There is a lot of helpful material here, especially when you are seeking historical context.

Have roots or connections to Chicago? Checkout This Clever Map Compares Chicago Before and After the Great Fire. You can overlay two maps: “One, culled from Google Maps’ API, shows Chicago of (roughly) today. The other is a color map of the city drawn in 1868, three years before the Great Fire.”

2010 Census - Tribal Tract Reference Maps are available from the US Census Bureau. These give you a very detailed perspective on tribal census tracts and tribal block groups as delineated to support 2010 Census data dissemination. The maps also show the boundaries and names of American Indian reservations, off-reservation trust lands (ORTLs), Alaska Native areas, Hawaiian home lands, states, counties, county subdivisions, places, and much more. A great resource to match against historic maps and visualize how reservations have changed through time.

If you are doing French genealogy, be aware of some Linguistic Oddities. “Beyond the study of name-mangling in parish and civil registrations is the issue of odd terminology ... Reading civil and parish registrations is repetitious work and just as we begin to doze off, invariably, an odd term will snap us awake, even make us laugh. But these terms can be baffling as well, so today we give a mini-lexicon.”

Appreciating where surnames might be found can often help us advance our genealogy research. One tool that might help you is PublicProfiler Worldnames. At this site, you enter your surname (or the one that interests you) and run a search to determine the world-wide distribution of the name. Do know that you need to enter an email address and indicate gender to get started. The coverage is North American, Europe, the UK, India, China, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina. The map shown is for Barna which fits my ancestor’s migration from Galicia (Poland near the borders with the Ukraine and Slovakia (previously Kingdom of Hungary).

Though not “new” definitely important to our research: Tips for reading old handwriting, Tips for Reading Old Records: Handwriting, Spelling, and Boundaries, and Deciphering Old Handwriting. If you want to test yourself on Early American Handwriting, play this “game” to decode the messages of handwritten documents. How did you do?

A fun visual bit of history, 14 Amateur Photos Taken With the Very First Consumer Camera. “Introduced in 1888, the Kodak No. 1 was the first camera marketed to average consumers. And thanks to a new set of images from the National Media Museum, we can now see what kinds of photos these early amateurs shot.”

Trove is a wonderful collection of digitized Australian newspapers. It includes National, Regional, and State newspapers. As of earlier this week there were 13,683,606 pages consisting of 131,943,198 articles available to search, covering from 1803 to 2007. Learn more about the Australian Newspaper Digitsation Program.

Editor’s Note: Thanks to everyone that responded to the Upfront Mini Bytes survey. Based on your feedback, this feature will continue with the same format and frequency.

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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11 June 2014

What's the truth behind the legend in many African American families about having a Native American ancestor?

As a professional genealogist who does a lot of research into African American families in North Carolina, who is often asked to document/prove that there is Native American ancestry mixed into such ancestry (rarely successful), I was very interested to read Henry Louis Gates Jr article “High Cheekbones and Straight Black Hair?” (The Root).

His article is a homage to a 1934 book by Joel A Rogers, “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof” and “Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 76: What’s the truth behind the legend in many African-American families about having a Native American ancestor?”

The bottom line conclusion by Gates is that “most black people aren’t ‘part Indian,’ despite family lore.” Gates reaches this conclusion based on DNA evidence and states “Bottom line? Those high cheekbones and that straight black hair derive from our high proportion of white ancestors and not, for most of us at least, from our mythical Cherokee great-great grandmother. Sorry, folks, but DNA don’t lie.”

As you can imagine, this article has resulted in over 200 comments (so far) with many of them pointing to other studies which refute some of what Mr. Gates states or personal diatribes against Mr. Gates, etc.

At the same time as I was reading the above article, I came across an older article (2012) on CNN on its INAMERICA page, Pain of 'Trail of Tears' shared by Blacks as well as Native Americans. As the author states, “The iconic tragedy of Indian Removal: the Cherokee Trail of Tears that relocated thousands of Cherokees to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), was also a Black migration. Slaves of Cherokees walked this trail along with their Indian owners.”

We know from slavery elsewhere, that whenever you have an enslaved population, you also have children born from interactions between the enslavers and the enslaved. Hence, there can be African American living in Oklahoma who are part Cherokee. Back in 2005 one descendant wrote about this topic in “Ancestry in a Drop of Blood,” which discusses DNA testing and Cherokee ancestry. You can learn more about this controversy via this Wikipedia page and more about Native American DNA Projects via Robert Estates and her DNAeXplained – Genetic Genealogy webpage. Back in 2009, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture held a symposium, IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, which increased the visibility of those who share African American and Native American Ancestry.

I don’t believe that there is a definitive “answer” to the question of Native American ancestry for African Americans (or for Caucasian Americans). Both of these articles provide some food for thought and remind us that we have to look at the specifics for each individual and family to really figure out each unique story. It may be that your African American ancestors are part Native American and may be not, the same as is true for Caucasian Americans who also have family lore revolving around Native American ancestors.

For me, I will continue to do the following for any clients interested in pursuing Native American ancestors:

1. Research the paper trail. Did ancestors ever self-identify or were they identified as Native American, “yellow” or in some manner designated as not Black/White which could be suggestive of Native American ancestry? Did they live in an area with an identified Native American population at the time in question?

2. Suggest DNA testing. This may have no bearing on tribal membership and it would “possibly” confirm Native American ancestry (only if the relevant DNA has descended to whoever was tested as representative of the family) and possibly suggest about how many generations ago such DNA entered your genes.

What do you think? How much credence to we give to “any” family lore? Are certain types of family lore less reliable than others?

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NGS does not imply endorsement of any outside advertiser or other vendors appearing in this blog. Any opinions expressed by guest authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of NGS.

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

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Unless indicated otherwise or clearly an NGS Public Relations piece, Upfront with NGS posts are written by Diane L Richard, editor, Upfront with NGS.

16 December 2013

Native American Ancestral Research -- Don't Limit Yourself to Federally and State Recognized Tribes!

Image as appeared with Selected Native American Resources in Genealogy

Sometimes it’s the little things that catch our eye. Last week while doing research at the Government and Heritage Library (GHL) (part of the State Library of North Carolina), I saw a map that reminded me that though the Cherokee nation might be the only Federally Recognized tribe in North Carolina, there are several State Recognized tribes and still other tribes whose territory included North Carolina.

Source: http://www.native-languages.org/virginia.jpg

A blog post yesterday, Selected Native American Resources in Genealogy, on the GHL blog includes the same map and a list of helpful related resources held by GHL. Though the Cherokee tribe members and ancestors are better documented, when there is family lore that NC ancestors were Native American, you will want to consider the possibility that they were not Cherokee (the most popular tribe mentioned in such lore) and that that they might have been members of the Lumbee, Coharie, Meherrin, Halawi-Saponi and or another tribe.

It’s easy to get focused on the Federally recognized tribes and not know or remember that states like North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia all still have Native American populations and are home to many State Recognized Tribes. Check out the Federal and State Recognized Tribes list published by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Additionally, there are Native American tribes which have neither State nor Federal Recognition and yet these tribes clearly existed and have descendants today living on what were ancient tribal lands. Recognize though that many tribes may also no longer be resident in states where they once were found. Or, those descendants who remain

Given that there was a Tuscarora war 1711-1715 in NC, this tribe comes to mind for me as one which falls into this category. This maps shows that there are other tribes which were resident in NC at the time of European contact and so they are also candidates as a source of Native American heritage in your family tree! Access Genealogy has a nice collection of information about Native American populations (The Indian Tribes of North American) including a list of North Carolina Indian Tribes which documents ALL the identified tribes that at any time resided in North Carolina. This site has many more resources that you will want to check out.

source: http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p249901coll22/id/76866

So, when considering Native American ancestry and its possible presence in your family tree, dig into the history of the Native Americans in the state during the time period where your family lived. Look beyond Federally and State recognized tribes and into ALL Native Americans resident at the appropriate time. Since intermarrying could have occurred at any time, your Native American ancestry might be from a tribe no longer in existence (as a recognized tribe) and yet was very real at one time.

If you’ve successfully identified/documented a Native American ancestry link to a not Federally or State recognized tribe, please share your story?

What resources were helpful?

What suggestions would you offer those attempting to do the same?

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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25 November 2013

November is Native American Heritage Month -- Let's Celebrate!

Many have Native American ancestry and since this is Native American Heritage Month, let’s celebrate!

I was reminded of this when the State Library of North Carolina unveiled its new resource page Native American Heritage which states ...

November is Native American Heritage Month. The State Library would like to take this time to honor the first inhabitants of North Carolina.

Native American heritage in North Carolina, as well as the country as a whole, has very deep roots. Before the first Europeans arrived, North Carolina was inhabited by three major Native American language groups: Iroquoian tribes in the north, the Siouan tribes in the piedmont, and the Algonquian tribes in the tidewater region.

Currently, North Carolina has the largest Native American population east of the Mississippi River.There are eight state recognized tribes in North Carolina: the Cherokee, Coharie, Haliwa-Saponi, Lumbee, Meherrin, Occaneechi Bands of the Saponi, Sappony and the Waccamaw Siouan Indian Tribes.

Today, the Native American influence can be found in some of the foods we eat, the arts, jewelry, clothing and the names of cities, towns and rivers in North Carolina. Please join the State Library as we celebrate the heritage of North Carolina's first inhabitants.

Besides the State Library of North Carolina, The North Carolina Museum of History is celebrating the 18^th Annual American Indian Heritage celebration and several of the local universities have and are offering special programs all month long. Check to see if there are any programs being held in your area and any local resource collections to assist you as you celebrate and/or research Native American heritage.

Interested in celebrating? Here are some more resources:

Native American Heritage Month (LOC, NARA and other US Government agencies)
National American Indian & Alaska Native Heritage Month History (Bureau of Indian Affairs)
Southeastern Native American Documents, 1730-1842 (Upfront with NGS)

Did you attend a celebration? Tell us about it! Know of a "must use" Native American family history research resource? Let us know!

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com

29 October 2013

Call for Guest Bloggers -- Ethnic Communities Found Within the United States -- Genealogy/Family History Research into!

Source: http://allthingslearning.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/blogging-guest-bloggers-welcome.jpg

Upfront with NGS is considering a series of blog posts focusing on “ethnic” research. The initial primary focus is research for ethnic communities found within the United States though we hope to expand the list of topics in the near future to be more global.

We would like to use a format of Top XX tips or Top XX resources for XX research.

Initially we would like to publish posts about the following topics:

· Jewish Genealogy (גניאלוגיה יהודית)

· Native American Genealogy

· African American Genealogy

· French-Canadians who migrated down from Canada (Généalogie Canadienne-Française)

· Hispanic Genealogy (Genealogía Hispana)

· any other ethnic group for which research into presents special genealogy research challenges

If you consider yourself an expert on one or more of these topics, please e-mail us at UpFront@ngsgenealogy.org with a proposed blog post or hyperlinks to previously written material on the topic which you would like to consider!

Requirements include:

· Minimum length of 600 words. Depending on length, a post might become a series such as with the DNA series by Roberta Estes earlier this year.

· Includes at least one graphic.

· No remuneration is provided.

· Author is given a 50 word byline + one hyperlink (at the end of the post).

Upfront with NGS is always looking for quality submissions by “guest bloggers.” Topics need to be about a genealogy (family history) related or a relatable topic. Broad appeal is preferable to very narrow/specific topics. Are you an expert or passionate about something genealogical? If so, please submit a proposal. If it’s relevant to genealogy researchers, it will be considered. Some topic suggestions include: free and/or large databases, research techniques, new technology, resources, DNA testing, etc.

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Want to learn more about interacting with the blog, please read Hyperlinks, Subscribing and Comments -- How to Interact with Upfront with NGS Blog posts!

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Think your friends, colleagues, or fellow genealogy researchers would find this blog post interesting? If so, please let them know that anyone can read past UpFront with NGS posts or subscribe!

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Suggestions for topics for future UpFront with NGS posts are always welcome. Please send any suggested topics to UpfrontNGS@mosaicrpm.com