Uncle Sam Lends A Hand

If you, like me, have Native American ancestry, the prospect of trying to research that ancestry can be daunting, but be of good cheer: your Uncle Sam can be a great help to you.

Some are fortunate enough to be well versed in their Native American ancestry because it was passed down to them orally by older family members who had learned it from their own elders. For far too many of us, however, the oral tradition was lost when the children were forcibly hauled off to Indian boarding schools to “civilize” them by, among other things, brutally punishing any youngster who dared speak any language other than English.

Moreover, those students who didn’t already have a good “white” name were assigned names by the school authorities, making it rather difficult to connect your great-grandmother Emma to her family in the tribal rolls before she reached school age. She is, however, probably there under her Native name or simply as “girl” in her native language. If she is Anishinaabe, look for her as “Kwe-sance” or “I-quai-sans” “Kway-sens” or some variation thereof, which simply means “female child”. More about Indian School records at the end of this post.

Young children can pick up new languages fairly easily, but they also easily forget languages that they cannot use in daily life. Thousands of boarding school children were stripped of their native languages and thereby became unable to learn about their own heritage and their own family history from the elders who did not speak English. Nowadays, most Native American tribes and bands have educational programs to preserve and pass on their linguistic and cultural heritage; for some, it may be too late.

However, for those who want to know the history of our own family as far back as possible, the US government inadvertently created records which can help us do so. In fact, I was rather astonished to learn how much information is available.

Naturally, the government created those records not for our benefit but for its own convenience in keeping track of us, and (bureaucracies being what they are) many of those records have survived. These include Indian School records, tribal censuses and rolls of persons who had a share of tribal annuities (minuscule financial compensation for the lands which had been hornswoggled from us). At the insistence of the Native Americans themselves, mixed-blood relatives were often included in the censuses and the annuity payments.

Investigations were commonly made to determine which persons (particularly mixed-bloods) were entitled to the treaty benefits, and the records of some of those investigations have survived. Some have been published; others are available in various libraries or historical societies. Those can be extremely useful if you want to sort out several persons with the same “white” name to determine which is your ancestor. A search online by tribe (plus treaty year or treaty name should turn up information about such investigations, including discussions in online forums, message boards, and mailing lists.

Annuity rolls are lists of persons in a given tribe or band who received a share of those annual payments. Usually they contain simply the name of the head of the family and the number of adult males, adult females, and children (often by gender) for whom the head collected payment. (A large family in 1868 might collect a whole $8, most of which usually went immediately to to pay off debts at the local trading post.) Family heads were usually listed by their “civilized” names if they had one, but often the annuity rolls contain the Indian name as well.

Indian censuses (unlike Federal or State censuses) were taken annually and are therefore extremely valuable. They generally list each person’s name(s), ages, and gender, although many families did not disclose the actual names of small children but had them listed only as “boy” or “girl”. A personal name has power among Native Americans and is not to be taken lightly. Many Native Americans to this day therefore have “everyday names” (English or translated Native American) as well as one or more “private” names (usually in their own language) which are not shared with outsiders.

The wonderful thing about turn-of-the-20th-century annuity and census rolls is that they often contain both the Indian name and the “white” name, enabling you to make that connection and take the line back into the era when Native Americans had only Native American names in their own languages.

The catch in the annuity rolls and Indian censuses is that Native Americans generally did not have written languages and, until fairly well into the 20th century, a name (like every other word) was spelled in English “like it sounds”. Therefore, it takes effort to figure out that the weird spelling of a Native American name in the previous year’s records is the same name in the next year’s records but with a different spelling from that used by the previous agent. For example, among the Anishinaabe, a female child might be called “female child” in the Anishinaabe language, so that the girl appears as “Kwe-sanse”, “I-quay-zance”, “E-kway-sens” and every possible spelling imaginable from one year to the next, until one year she shows up on the rolls as Mary.

The Indian Census rolls generally include a number for each individual which (in later censuses) may be cross-referenced to the previous year’s census; they may include whether the person is living on the reservation or elsewhere, and and often give either age or year and/or exact date of birth. Some Indian Agents would note births and deaths on their own copy of last year’s census so they could minimize the task of taking this year’s census, and if one of those personal copies is the one that has survived, you may be able to solve a family mystery with it. I did.

The National Archives in Washington, DC, is the main repository for Indian census and annuity rolls and other federal government records up to about 1935-1940, and most are available on microfilm both in Washington, DC and at Regional branches of the National Archives. (The Regional Branches of the National Archives generally have the rolls only for tribes in the area of their region.) More recent records will probably still be in the custody of whichever arm of the Bureau of Indian Affairs has present jurisdiction for the band or tribe to which your ancestor belonged.

Important: To find any government records for a specific tribe or band, you need to search under the "white" version of the name, not what the tribe or band prefers: for example “Chippewa”, not “Ojibwe” or “Ojibway” or “Otchipwe” or even “Anishinaabe”, or “Sioux”, not Dakota, or Navajo or Apache rather than Dine (pronounced “dee-NAY”).

I’d start an online search with Google or another search engine: for example: Sioux + “annuity rolls” or “Indian Census”. That should lead not only to whatever sources exist but where the records are available on microfilm or in transcription besides the National Archives. Search for family or individual names, too. There are probably many people researching members of your ancestor's tribe or even the same family.

Current records are usually in the custody of the band or tribe’s current government. Do NOT, however, try to get information directly from the band or tribe: its officials are much too busy with the essential affairs of their community to be able or willing to spend the time doing research for you or anyone else. (It’s amazing the number of people who want to become enrolled in a Native American tribe which has a casino!) In addition, tribal officials are naturally reluctant to open their current records to outsiders because they contain information about living persons. No one wants to make identity theft easy.

Indian censuses are also available online at Ancestry.com as part of the U.S. Collection, which is not exactly free, although your friendly local Family History Center (LDS/Mormon Church) may have a subscription to Ancestry.com for its patrons to use there. If yours doesn't have a subscription, it should still have microfilm readers, and you can rent many of the National Archives microfilms for use there. If you don't have an accessible local Family History Center, you can still purchase a copy of any National Archives microfilm from the National Archives and take it to any local facility that has microfilm readers, such as a public library, college or university library, a historical or genealogical society, or even a local newspaper.

You should know that the purported contents of a particular set/microfilm of Indian Census records may vary wildly from what’s actually on it. You are likely to get duplications (2 copies of 1894 instead of the promised 1894 and 1895), unlisted additions, and omissions. You may need to examine quite a few sets to get the complete surviving rolls for a particular band or tribe.

Annuity rolls are a little harder to come by, particularly for those tribes/bands who are still receiving annuities under a treaty. Many annuity roles can be found at universities, historical societies, or state archives and, if microfilmed, may be available through Interlibrary Loan. The Dawes rolls for the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes have been published in book form; so have rolls for some other tribes.

Surviving Indian school records are available on microfilm or as actual documents in the National Archives in Washington DC or at Regional Branches. Many of these deal only with financial and administrative matters, but some do give helpful information about the students. Some of the school records are lists of students at the various boarding schools, and some of these are available online at Ancestry.com. Also, some boarding school records have more complete student information, and many of these on microfilm and available from the Family History Library through your local Family History Center.

In addition to the above, there are National Archives microfilms of Indian Agency records (much of it correspondence with agents higher up in the food chain). Mission records (Catholic and Protestant) can contain a great deal of useful information (such as the names of an adult convert's parents). You'll be surprised at what you can learn from local histories, travelers' reminiscences, land records, and local civil and criminal court records in the possession of a state, county, or municipality. Historical societies and universities can also be gold mines of information.

For full information on what Native American records the National Archives has, and where they are housed, click here. There are other links on that site you can follow to uncover more details, including how to order microfilms online.

There's Nothing Like A Good, Juicy Probate

At the very beginning of my genealogical research of my Ojibwe/French-Canadian ancestry, one of the most important documents for my search was what we all called the Heirs List: the list of relatives of Joseph Chosa (Jr.), my Grandpa Henry’s brother, who had died a childless bachelor in 1938. He died poor, but he did have an allotment situated on a hilltop overlooking Keweenaw Bay in Michigan. (An allotment, for those of you who don't know, is a parcel of land on a Reservation allotted to an individual member of that tribe, with the idea that he or she should farm it and so support self and family.)

Joseph’s heirs were his siblings (most of whom had died) or their surviving legal heirs—the first people on the Heirs List. Their names and locations were all listed along with birth and death information and names of spouses. This particular document was issued in the 1950s and has been updated on several occasions through the decades afterwards, as various heirs died and their shares passed on to their legal heirs—dozens of them, now hundreds and growing every year. There was a distribution of timber income a few years ago, but that's all. 

Real estate always requires a probate unless the decedent has made a will, which few Native Americans do. Probates for Native Americans are handled by the federal government and can take years, even decades to settle, when an allotment on a reservation is at stake—as Joseph's probate shows. (The government’s preferred solution for an allottee with no heirs by blood has generally been to sell the land, usually to some deserving white person or company at a bargain rate. Perhaps the bureaucrats think that without land, Native Americans will finally submit to being completely swallowed up by white society, white culture, and white values. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen anytime soon.)

My mother had a copy of the Heirs List, so did my aunts and several cousins, and all of them were happy to share their copies (with annotations) so that I could do what I’m doing now: tracing as many members of our extended clan as possible, living or otherwise.

Since Great-Grandfather Vincent Dufauld and his daughters were enrolled at Bois Forte, my mother was also enrolled there and eventually, so was I. This means that when the Bois Forte Band began publishing a newsletter for its members, I received a copy of every issue. In the issue for March 2003, J. Kay Davis, the then official Band Historian, wrote about one of several Bois Forte Inheritance Files she had found during a research trip to the National Archives in Washington, DC. (The term “Inheritance File” was used rather than probate, possibly because the term “probate” was what they used for white folks and the government didn’t want to imply that Native Americans had the same rights . . . or perhaps that they were really fully human.)

The file in question involved the estate of Alex Vivier, who died in December 1914. At issue was the land allotted before the turn of the century to Alex’s young daughter Mary, whose death was recorded in May 1903. Under the law, Mary’s allotment went to her father (her mother had died in 1899). After Alex’s death, his property, by law, was divided equally between his widow (who was not the mother of any of his living children) and his two surviving children by his first wife. One of those children, Edith, protested on the grounds that she and Mary were in fact the same person; that the Indian agent had gotten the records mixed up by failing to register Edith’s birth at the correct time, then (to make up for the annuity payments she should have received), created a fictitious child “Mary” who was then “killed off” once the shortage had been made up. During her “lifetime,” “Mary” was given an allotment, which should have been registered to Edith. (If this sounds complicated, that’s because it really is complicated.) Not surprisingly, the decision went against Edith despite the testimony of many people who swore that Edith was the first-born child of her parents.

What got me excited was that Alex’s widow happened to be my own great-grandmother, Saag-i-ji-way-ga-bo-wiik, who had had two daughters by her earlier relationship with Vincent Dufauld. My great-grandmother gave testimony during the proceedings.

I immediately contacted Kay about where, precisely, this file was located and explained the reason for my excitement. My husband and I were already scheduled to fly to Washington about two weeks later, where he was to receive an award, and if I could access probate files for family members I could answer a great many questions. Kay immediately sent me the information I needed, and when in Washington I was able to spend about 6 hours at the National Archives looking for records involving my great-grandparents and other kin.

Talk about pay dirt!! I found not only Alex Vivier’s “Inheritance File”, but one for my great-grandmother’s son—whose very existence was news to us—a young man named Mush-kah-wa-nance (whose father, like my great-grandmother, was from Lac La Croix in Canada, where the father had died). Mush-kah-wah-nance died unmarried and childless in January 1901, but he had crossed the border, been enrolled at Bois Forte and had an allotment. It took ten years to settle the case, by which time my Great-Grandfather Vincent Dufauld had also died. Someone in the bureaucracy got the idea (NOT from Vincent’s widow or her daughter) that the young man’s father “must be” Vincent since Vincent had fathered two of Saag-i-ji-way-ga-bo-wiik’s other daughters (Annie and Clara Dufauld). Since Vincent had outlived Mush-kah-wah-nance, under Minnesota law in 1901 he, as the father, would have been the sole legal heir and Mush-kah-wah-nance's allotment should have been part of Vincent's estate after Vincent's death in 1910. (A relatively speedy settlement: this one took only 9 years.)

At the hearing, my great-grandmother explained Mush-kah-wah-nance’s actual parentage, and no one disagreed with her. Vincent’s widow and their daughter were clearly both decent, honest people: they both swore that Mush-kah-wa-nance was not Vincent’s child even though they would otherwise have inherited the young man’s allotment. My great-grandmother inherited the allotment, or rather the proceeds from its sale. (I’m sure she would have preferred for her son to be still alive and preferably producing grandchildren.)

But the most exciting information came from the inheritance file of Vincent himself, who died in September 1910, although the heirship process didn’t begin until 1912 and the estate wasn’t settled until early 1915. As you may have gathered already, Vincent had something of a reputation for straying from the marital relationship, and there were rumors that he had a son about 45-46 years old as of 1913 living somewhere in Wisconsin, possibly near La Pointe.

Vincent’s brother Peter and a lifelong friend named Baptiste Artischoe testified before the Indian Agent for that area that Vincent had never been married to anyone except to May-min-waun-da-gosh-eake of Bois Forte. Apparently no one ever noticed that since (according to the 1880 census) Vincent was born about 1857, this alleged 45- or 46-year-old son would have been born somewhere about 1868, when Vincent was about 10 or 11 years old—clearly impossible no matter how precocious he was.

Peter also stated that Vincent had lived at Bayfield with his parents until about 1882, then went to his uncle in Superior, Wisconsin; about September of that year, Peter testified, “Vincent Dufauld went to work for their uncle in his trading post near Tower, Minn. In a year or so after his arrival at Tower he married the woman with whom he was living at the time of his death.”

The file also gave the names of his parents (Micheal [sic] Dufauld and Josette Dufauld, and his four surviving siblings: Peter (age 51 in 1912), and sisters Julia, Mary, and Lizzie. Vincent’s grandparents were listed as “Joe Dufauld and ?” and “Vincen [sic] and Lizzie Roy”.

I now had documentary confirmation of my cousin’s information as to Vincent’s parents and grandparents.

Vincent’s probate also revealed a major dispute over whether my grandmother Clara was Vincent’s daughter or not. Vincent’s wife May-min-waun-da-gosh-eake and his daughter Mary (Kay-ge-gay-ah-bun-du-moke), by then married to a white man named Joseph Cook) both testified that while Vincent had always acknowledged being the father of Annie, he “asserted time and again that he was not the father” of Clara—and I believe they were telling the exact truth. However, if Vincent denied paternity “time and again”, this means that his wife and daughter must have kept asking about it! I suspect that Vincent fibbed to them for the sake of domestic tranquility: he simply didn’t want to get beaned with a skillet (or worse) over a second “indiscretion” with my great-grandmother.

It’s interesting that Alex Vivier, now married to my great-grandmother Saag-i-ji-way-ga-bo-wiik, acted as interpreter for all the proceedings. You might think someone would object on the grounds of a conflict of interest, but nobody did. He must have been well known and trusted as a person of sterling probity who wouldn’t twist anyone’s testimony even to benefit his wife or her children.

Alex Vivier himself testified that he had asked Vincent whether he should have both Annie and Clara enrolled in the Bois Forte band under the surname Dufauld; that Vincent had acknowledged paternity of both girls; and that Vincent specifically told him to enroll them both with the surname Dufauld. Several other people testified that Vincent had freely acknowledged paternity of Clara to them. There was testimony that Vincent gave money, clothing, and other gifts equally to both girls (but not to Saag-i-ji-way-ga-bo-wiik’s other children).

In the end, the authorities seem to have decided that actions speak louder than words; they ruled that Clara was indeed Vincent’s daughter and divided Vincent’s estate according to the law: 1/3 to the wife, and the remaining 2/3 in equal shares to the three daughters.

To their very great credit, Vincent’s widow and legitimate daughter held no grudge over this affair. They accepted that Vincent had been untruthful to them and indeed, my mother remembers that whenever she came to town, Clara always called on Mary and her mother and was warmly welcomed; in fact, Mary and Clara were “best buds”.

You may think all of this as proof that I am descended from truly awful, sinful people, but you’re wrong. Among the Anishinaabe, as with most other Native American groups, when a couple married (often without ceremony of any kind) the intention was to remain together so long as the relationship remained pleasing and supportive to both parties—and there are many thousands of documented instances where the couple stayed together for life.

Splitting up and moving on to another relationship was no disgrace, only good sense when circumstances became bad. Women were not considered possessions, but equal companions who had the right to move on if they wished. Vincent, his wife, and my great-grandmother were simply abiding by their culture’s tradition and customs. And that, I maintain, was their right as human beings.

There are not a whole lot of probates (“Inheritance Files”) for Native Americans, but the National Archives in Washington has 5 boxes of them for Minnesota Chippewas. (I intend to go back there one of these days and look for other family probates.) Others are to be found in Regional branches of the National Archives. (I found some for relatives in Wisconsin in the Chicago branch not too long ago.) If you have Native American ancestors, it’s very much worth your while to look for them in the inheritance files for their tribe or band. You never know what juicy tidbits of information you might find; heck, you might just find a really big and tender steak—or maybe even a whole steer.

Trust No One

My Second Genealogical Mantra is this: Never, never, never trust anyone else’s research and graft it onto your own family tree; always examine the original records yourself.

It doesn’t matter what the reputation of that researcher is: every genealogist is (I assume) human, and therefore capable of making mistakes. Consider someone else’s findings as leads to records rather than confirmed fact. That other person may have made a lot of mistakes, which is very easy to do and so-o-o tempting to swallow without question.

Here’s an example: I eventually discovered that one of my 6G grandfathers was Charles Demers-dit-Dumay, whose marital history turned out to be thoroughly confusing for later researchers, although I’m sure it was no problem for him. This entire line of Demers-dit-Dumay were a contrary bunch who, generation after generation, managed to inhabit parishes where large swaths of the parish registers were going to disappear.

The marriage record for my 5G grandfather Antoine Demers had told me that he was the son of Charles and of the deceased Marie-Charlotte Durand of Lanoraie. To take the lines back, I had to locate his parents’ marriage record.

I really needed that marriage record, because marriage records are the key to Quebec genealogy.

As I said in an earlier post, a Quebec marriage record almost always gives not only the names and home parishes of the bride and groom but the names of their parents, where they live, and whether any of the parents are now deceased; it may even give the occupation of the fathers and/or of the groom. The record also generally names the witnesses to the marriage and the relationship of each to the bride or groom. But in the case of a widow or widower, often only the name of the deceased spouse is given, and the names of that party’s parents are commonly omitted.

Now, this was before the indexed Drouin Collection of Quebec parish registers came online at Ancestry.com. I already had the microfilm of the Lanoraie register at hand (ordered through my friendly local Family History Center for a different family line), so I knew that large chunks of it were missing, and that what was left was in extremely bad condition and written with extremely bad penmanship; in fact, it was almost entirely illegible. So I consulted Tanguay to see if I could pin down the marriage date and place for Charles.

By the way, Tanguay is now online at Ancestry.com, which is useful if you have the World Deluxe subscription that lets you access Quebec records. If you don’t, the free website for the Tanguay which I mentioned in my second post to this blog is still open and still free. You can’t download it, but you can page through it all you wish.

Tanguay showed only one marriage for a Charles Demers-Dumay at Lanoraie, and this was to a woman named Charlotte Gauthier in 1753. I duly examined the Lanoraie microfilm and found that marriage record, which stated that he was the widower of Charlotte Durand. Tanguay had not noticed that that detail, but I still didn’t know who Charles’s parents were. So I turned to another well-known marriage index, which gave names of his parents and what proved to be the correct date and place of both of the Durand and Gauthier marriages. But I still needed to document the identity of his parents, since that information was not in either of those two marriage records.

So I looked backward in the Lanoraie register from the 1753 marriage date to see if Charlotte Durand had died in that parish. Bingo! She had died at Lanoraie nine months before Charles had remarried. Had the couple also been married at Lanoraie, as the second marriage index said?

Bingo again! Charles and Charlotte Durand had married at Lanoraie in 1734, and the actual record gave me the new fact that he was the widower of Angélique Leclerc. I soon found Angélique’s death and burial record at Lanoraie 6 months prior to the marriage to Charlotte Durand. I still didn’t know who Charles’s parents were, so I now needed to find the record of that marriage to Angélique, since it wasn’t at Lanoraie.

So I turned to yet another well-known marriage index, and this one not only gave me a different set of parents for the Charles who married both Angélique and Charlotte Durand but gave the date for Charles’s first marriage as having taken place at St-Ours . . . in 1824. This had to be a typo, but it still didn’t give me the information I needed.

Someone’s online family tree said that Charles’s first marriage (allegedly to Charlotte Gauthier instead of Angélique) was at Contrecoueur in 1729, and that Charlotte Durand, not Charlotte Gauthier, was the bride in 1753.

By this time I was deeply suspicious as to whether anyone had tracked down Charles’s marital history and parentage correctly. The second and third marriages were where both respected indexes said they would be, but I didn’t find the first. So, after the excruciating task of going through the surviving records at Lanaoraie, I started looking at the registers of the parishes nearest to Lanoraie—and I finally found the marriage at nearby Contrecoueur, in 1729, which that mixed-up family tree said was the time and place of Charles’s first marriage. That researcher had gotten everything else about Charles wrong, but he or she had in fact found the right marriage record!

Best of all, that marriage record yielded up the names of Charles’s parents, who were NOT the couple listed in the second index I had consulted. His father actually was a witness to the first wedding and his parish of residence was given, so I now knew where to look for more records of Charles's parents and possibly find Charles's baptism record as well.

This is why I never trust any secondary source, be it someone’s published family tree or any marriage dictionary or index, no matter how highly-regarded it is. Everyone makes mistakes. And people who make a lot of mistakes can still get some things right.

This experience proved to me that I need to examine every record for myself and mine each record for every detail or hint it can give me, and I urge you to do the same. If I hadn’t done that with Charles, I probably would have connected him to the wrong parents (there were several men with the same name) and I would never have been able to trace his actual lines back to his true origins in France.