I even started a research project called "The Indians of Stanly County" wherein I looked at different families, a few from just the rumor, but several who have "dark genes", coloration that belies more than European origins. White people will usually tell you they are Cherokee. I think because its just the name of a tribe they had heard of. Black people will say that they are Blackfoot. Probably just because of the word "black". Not long ago I got into a bit of a disagreement with a couple of girls on Facebook. Both white, one was claiming to be of Cherokee descent, the other Sioux. Being from the Carolina Piedmont, both these scenarios are highly unlikely. I tried to explain to them that people years ago, including Native Americans, migrated west not east. It was unlikely that a Cherokee in the past several decades came east to the Uwharries to end up in someone's family tree, but not impossible, that I will admit. But the Sioux??? They were from the Midwest, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin maybe, but NOT North Carolina. I looked into their family trees, and just as I thought, they were both descended from the Dutch Creek Germans and the Pee Dee River UK derived Baptists and the Scots who came up the Cumberland into Chatham and Moore Counties and on into Montgomery and Stanly. No trace of Native American heritage. If there was any, say, prior to 1740 or so, it had all washed out. The "my Grandmother was Cherokee" did not pan out. Your grandmother was probably 25 percent Scotch-Irish, about 50 percent German Lutheran and 25 percent English who had originally settled along the James River.
I did find however, while looking at living families who have brown skin, most had an actual traceable Native American origin. But it was not Cherokee. They led to not-well-known Native American tribes from the East Coast of North Carolina, Southern Virginia or from the North/South Carolina border.
When Stanly County was formed in 1841, there were several families labeled "Free People of Color", listed as mulatto's, who were not of European or African origins, but were actually families who had migrated into the Piedmont from their origins in Counties east. They may have been of mixed ancestry, but their primary identity was that of "Indian" with a few making claims to "Portugee" or Portuguese origins. These brown-skinned families held the names of Bell, Hedgespeth, Fowler and Bass, among others. These names are common among the Haliwa-Saponi, Lumbee, Waccamaw, Tuscarora, Nansemond and other small tribes today.
One family I traced back to Cheraw and Marlboro counties in South Carolina through one grandmother. Cheraw County was named for the Cheraw tribe. The Cheraw were known to have owned the land that became the theme park called Carowinds, just south of Charlotte.
The original territory of the Cheraw is shown above. There are several families of the surname Chavis, this family's grandmother's maiden name, still living in small neighborhoods in these counties.
A few of the families were Lumbee. The Lumbee are actually the largest tribe east of the Mississippi. Robeson County is their main county of origin with Scotland coming in a close second, but they are actually scattered all over North and South Carolina these days.
I did find one family, the Chandlers, who had a son who had migrated from their family home on the Davidson/Montgomery County line, up to the N. C. mountains where he married a girl who was indeed, Cherokee, and brought her home. This line of the Chandlers ended up in Albemarle in Stanly County and all of the older members of the family definitely showed the genetics from their Cherokee ancestor.
But most of the families I researched, I could find no hint of a Native American ancestor at all.
One curious link I found was that some of the families I researched with "dark" genes had one ancestor in common, William Riley Morton.
A few others also had a common ancestor named David Blalock.
While other people all had a story about their Indian Princess grandmother, I have quite the opposite problem. My DNA showed Native American heritage, and I did not know where it came from.
Below is the results of from my DNA test uploaded to gedmatch.com. It shows I carry a percentage of Native American DNA on nearly every one of my 22 chromosomes.
| Amerindian | 3.0% | 5.4% | - | 2.1% | 3.0% | - | 2.0% | - | - | 1.9% | - | - | 3.4% | 1.3% | 1.5% | 1.8% | 4.5% | - | 7.0% | - | 0.3% | 1.7% |
This is the data that I tried to copy:
CH 1 CH2 CH 3 CH4 CH5 CH6 CH7 CH8 CH9 CH10 CH11
3.0 5.4 0 2.1 3.0 0 2.0 0 0 1.8 0
CH12 CH 13 CH14 CH15 CH16 CH 17 CH 18 CH 19 CH 20 CH21 CH22
0 3.4 1.3 1.5 1.8 4.5 0 7 0 3 1.7
So my biggest chunks appear to be on CH 19, CH 2 and CH 17. I don't know how scientific this is, but it would seem to me that I could go to DNA painter and see who, what families, I share DNA with on these Chromosomes. Well, that was no help, because guess what? Both sides and multiple families appear on each chromosome. As I can't detect which particular segments, starting point or ending point these particular segments of DNA are located in, DNA painter can't help me much in this aspect.
On the pie chart, it's a little easier to see as the dark blue pie wedge. That shows my 12.5 percent Native American ancestry. I have brown eyes and brown hair, but I am as pale as the 80 + percent of my ancestry would indicate.
For years I traced down a rumored Native American lineage on my mother's side of the family tree. Several years ago I came across a history of the Aldridge Family, written and researched by Pam Wilson.
Pam Wilson, Aldridge Family
In it, there was the linage of one Caleb Aldridge, of whom I am a descendant, down not one, but two different paths. Caleb Aldridge had a son named Caleb Aldridge Jr. Junior had two sons, the oldest being Henry Garner Aldridge. Garner had married a lady named Priscilla Murray, aka Prussia or Prucey. She was one of the younger daughters of Jesse Murray, who first shows up in Anson County and then crosses the Rocky River into what is now Stanly County and made his home on a ridge above Long Creek close to its junction with the Rocky River and there he remains. The Murray graveyard still exists in the middle of a cornfield and sometime more recently, perhaps 80 years after his death, two of his grandsons erected a monument in it to replace the fading fieldstone markers, one that has withstood the passage of time.
In the Aldridge family history was the statement that Priscilla Murray was rumored to be an Indian. There was no indication in the census records that she was. Only that she had had a mixed race child after the death of her husband, Garner. Another odd thing was that she had one sister, Mariah, who had had 7 children by Henry Wilkerson, a slave of neighbor James Wilkerson. This was not typical behavior of proper ladies of typical Caucasian birth, not in the 19th century. Could there have been some truth to the fact that they were in fact, not white, or not All white, themselves?
I traced Jesse Murray back to Chatham and Orange Counties. Chatham was formed from Orange County in 1771. His mother, Jane, left a will. There were two men in the area who could have been his father, Benjamin and Duncan. They were most likely brothers and sons of James. There is so little to go on. Benjamin is the most likely candidate due to naming patterns. Jesse had a son named Benjamin and several grandsons and great grandsons named Benjamin. Not one Duncan, not even as middle name.
I managed to trace this line of Murray's back to Brunswick County, Virginia. Several books and records refer to James Murray of Brunswick County.
Virginia Cousins: A Study of the Ancestry and Posterity of John Goode of ...
By George Brown GoodeIn the above book, I found the following paragraph as a side note:
*The Murray, Knox and Gordon Families-James Murray was a native of Scotland and of the lineage of William Murray, Lord Mansfield, the celebrated English jurist: he perpetuated the name of the ancestral seat in Scotland in that of his house, "Athol" near Petersburg. He married Anne Boling, a great granddaughter of Pocahantas."
So there is one link to Native American ancestry, very, very many generations ago, however and not my only link back to Pocahantas. For a girl who had but one child, she had a great many descendants. Both my Davis and Win(g)field lines lead back to Jamestown and in both lines is the family name "Warren" and this Warren family also leads back to Pocahantas. Could be that Presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren, with her family rumours of Native American ancestry, is a descendant of Pocahantas. But it is so far back, would any of it show? However, if you had at least 3 lines back to Pocahantas, that kind of triples the odds of carrying at least a segment of her DNA, doesn't it?
But back to Jesse. Jesse Murray married Elizabeth Bass in Orange County. While others believe she is the daughter of a Richard Bass of Wayne County, I am not so sure.
The only other Bass that I have found in Stanly County during that time was a Mary Bass otherwise known as Polly.
In the Stanly County deeds, I find in Book 1 Page 188 dated December 19,1842 where Mary Bass and Richard Hedgepeth sold to Lewis J. McSwain, for $37 12 and half cents, a tract of land on Ugly Creek of about 49 and half acres in size, including one half of a spring, for the use of him and his family only.
It was signed with an X by both Mary Bass and Richard Hedsgepeth, witnessed by William H. Randle and recorded on February 25th, 1844 by my ancestor, Samuel P. Morton, registrar.
The county was still part of Montgomery when they acquired it. Montgomery County does not have online access to older deeds, only recent ones between the 1990's and now. At this time, due to stay at home orders and lockdowns of nonessential business and no public access to Civic buildings, I have no access to old Montgomery County deeds to see if there are any in there for Mary Bass.
In the early court records, she is referred to as Polly Bass, and her name is mentioned several times. She seems to have had difficulty paying bills and taxes. In 1841, 40 acres of her land on Ugly Creek was sold for taxes of 26 cents. Right next to her name is that of Richard Hedspeth who had 200 acres of Ugly Creek sold for back taxes of $2.75.
On August 14, 1843, her name is again in a list of delinquent taxpayers, and it listed that she owned 40 acres with 24 acres being sold. Her taxes were .80 cents and bin on by E. L. Parker.
Agan is 1856, her taxes were delinquent and her 40 acres were up for bid. The tax was .60 cents. In May of 1857, the 40 acres were ordered to be sold. In August of 1847, 19 of those acres were up for bid for the .60 cents and again was bided on by E. L. Parker.
| Name: | Mary Bass | ||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gender: | Female | ||||||||||||||||||
| Age: | 60 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Birth Year: | abt 1790 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Birthplace: | North Carolina | ||||||||||||||||||
| Home in 1850: | Centre, Stanly, North Carolina, USA | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cannot Read, Write: | Y | ||||||||||||||||||
| Line Number: | 31 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Dwelling Number: | 75 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Family Number: | 76 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Household Members: |
|
The 1850 census shows Mary Bass as being 60 years old, which gives her an estimated birth year of about 1790. She is living in the home of Richard Hedspeth and his wife Lucy, their children and a Mary Hedspeth age 38. I wonder what the relationship between Mary Bass and the Hedspeth family was? They lived together and owned property separately and together.
Another interesting thing about this census is that all the Hedgpeth's are listed as being mulatto, or not white or black. Mary Bass is not, her race is blank, along with most of the other people on the page, who were known to be white. They lived next to a Merritt Blalock and just up the page is an Elizabeth Blalock. In her household are two children, 11-year-old John Jackson and 10-year-old Melissa Blalock, who are also listed as being mulatto, while Ms. Blalock was white.
The full page from the 1850 document shows Merritt Blalock listed after the Hedgepeth family, Caswell Cooper above, Elizabeth Blalock, with Mary Blalock and the two mulatto children next, the Miller Easley family above them and Davidson Fowler and his wife, Nancy, another mulatto family, above them.
An old cemetery record shows that Elizabeth was Elizabeth Swaringen Blalock, who would die young just a few months after this census.
The Hudson family also lived along Ugly Creek, and above are the oldest entries in their cemetery.
In the November 1853 Session of Court, in Stanly County, NC, a David Blalock was appointed administrator of the estate of both a different David Blalock and Mary Blalock, simultaneously. William Swaringen served as his security in both instances.
I looked for any other individuals this could have been, and there was no other Mary Blalocks who were alive in 1850, and not in 1860, except for a Mary Staton Blalock, born about 1780, whom everyone has dying in Mitchell County, NC. This was the young Mary, who would have been about 26. Unless all those people have it horribly wrong, which I would not doubt. The Blalock's are a can of worms I am not prepared to open. I wondered what happened to the children?
It is my belief that they went to Tennessee with the Merritt Blaylock, listed at the bottom of the page. He was a son of one of the David Blalocks, of which there were several. There was also another, younger, Merritt Blalock who did not go to Tennessee, so I can see where all of these individuals can be confusing. There, they mix into the diaspora of the mountain melee with a number of other Piedmont Carolinians and come in contact with the indefinable mountain people already there. Not only the Blalock's, but the Richardson Creek Yarborough/Hudson family of Anson/Union County, the Pleasant Almond family who stayed after their father returned to Stanly County after leaving their mother, Rebecca Lambert Almond, who was my aunt of a number of generations back. Add to that mix a branch of the Chandler family who may have connection to the current Chandler family of Stanly/Montgomery and Davidson Counties and the connections grow not just conceivable but concrete. They are our cousins. They are us and we are them.
*This post was a draft began about 5 years ago. I want to complete many of them, and delete others, I am sure. This one is pertinent to what I am currently working on, so I've presented it here.
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