Wunnegin, netompoag! (Welcome, my friends!)

This is the story of a conquered people, told by those who conquered them. It has a definite beginning, but the ending is yet to be written. Just before the Civil War, the powers-that-be decided to write that ending, simply by declaring the Indians dead. That worked surprisingly well, and many people even today still believe that to be true. Some of the lighter skinned Indians began to pass as whites, and the darker skinned were called "colored" or Negro in the records. Some became invisible and simply weren't mentioned in the records at all. Each town seems to have chosen one person to honor as "the last of the tribe," and incorporated that person into their history books.

But the Indians stayed, and some of them got back their tribal lands and reformed their tribes. Some of those people have websites, and I will attempt to find links to them all and offer them on my links pages.

Other Indians were able to survive by keeping their ancestral roots hidden, while others fled from tribe to tribe, seeking safety, but losing their own tribal identity in the process. Some families passed on their histories to the next generation through oral traditions, while some did not. Either way, most of the details got lost.

For those of us without tribal connections intact, recreating that history can become a lifelong challenge. It became mine. On the pages that follow, I share with you some of what I have learned. There are little treasures to be found in every deed, treaty, old document, personal letters, and history books. I pull out those treasures and match them up with other treasures until a truer picture of history begins to form.

Many people have assisted me, by sending new-to-me resources, directing me to library and online books, making documents available online that otherwise would remain hidden in archives, and even by sending me their own family's oral traditions.

Most of the information I present comes from secondary sources that I can only hope are reliable. It's the best that I have to work with. The genealogy that I glean from all sources go into database form, and I have several different databases. The one I've put online comes from the most accurate sources possible to find. It is likely that it still contains some errors, and certainly contains omissions. I will add to it from time to time, as new information becomes available to me. Other databases contain oral traditions, short lines that don't yet connect to proven lines in my official database, etc. As these databases grow, new connections get made and aliases get found. It's my hope that some of these lines will eventually make the jump to the official database. Please feel free to share with me your own lines and traditions. Only by pooling our resources can this project be successful.

David Blackwell has been busy OCR-scanning many books of historic and genealogical value to the New England researcher. Some of these books have been edited by volunteers and are presently online, and others are scanned and awaiting new volunteers. I've typed up one such book, and it is available and searchable by clicking on "BOOK" in my header. He's recently moved these books to the USIGS Library. See what else he has available, and help if you can.

             

Susan S. Martin
816 Concord Church Rd
Adolphus KY 42120

This website was transferred to Rootsweb on 11/11/00