Cindy Carman reviews the book Tracing Ancestors Among the Five Civilized Tribes by Rachal Mills Lennon.
At long last here is a clear and concise guide to doing Native American Research! MyTrees.com receives frequent emails and phone calls about how to do Native American research. I have read numerous outlines, books, and websites on the subject. Without exception the writers of these other resources have focused on the availability and content of the records created by the Federal Government for doing American Indian research.
Rarely do they address the process of doing the real research. Rachal Mills Lennon has truly presented a good research process for finding Native American ancestors. Ms Lennon points out two very important misconceptions about the family traditions and stories that researchers have about their American Indian heritage. I won't present them here; but because of these two misconceptions, Ms Lennon concludes that the first and best rule to researching Native American Ancestors is to "Proceed to research
as if the Indian tradition did not exist until a Native American Connection surfaces" (16).
She then continues her advice by giving 2 insightful tips:
1. Learn the social and political history of the area of your Indian ancestor.
2. Include pre-removal records in your search.
From this book I learned some very unusual Indian traditions that dramatically impact genealogy research. One such tradition is that in some Indian cultures it is taboo to speak the name of the dead or for wives to speak the names of their husbands. Another fact about Indian cultures that I had already understood, but which she made clearer to me, is that tribes were organized into clans and females were the heads with descent being traced through the mothers -- not the fathers (23). A couple's children
belonged to the mother's clan, not to the father's. This is only a sampling of the valuable insights you can get from this book. Ms. Lennon makes clear how these traditions can confuse and mislead you as a researcher and shows how to avoid this confusion.
In chapter two Ms. Lennon describes the research strategy that one must take to research Indian ancestry that existed prior to the removal of the American Indian to the reservations. She points the reader to US locations of pre-removal record collections from Spanish, French, and English sources that identify Indian relationships that otherwise would be impossible to discover.
In chapter three Ms. Lennon discusses the Federal Records that have been created. She helpfully does this in a chronological framework dividing the record into 1774-1789 Pre-Federal Era, 1789-1824 War Department Era, and 1824-1947 Bureau of Indian Affairs Era. Most valuable to the researcher is Figure 7 which outlines the step by step procedure for Locating Indian Records in the National Archives.
This book is a concise, easy to read volume and though its total length is 156 pages, the Appendix, Bibliography, and Index occupy the last 63 pages. With helpful charts, figures, maps, bibliography and explanations I believe this small book can help you to quickly discover your Native American ancestors. You can order "Tracing Ancestors Among the Five Civilized Tribes" by Rachal Mills Lennon by clicking this link Tracing Ancestors Among the Five Civilized Tribes by Rachal Mills Lennon. The book sells for $24.95.
Review written by Cindy Carman
