Whatever may be their
origins in antiquity, the Cherokees are
generally thought to be a Southeastern
tribe, with roots in Georgia, North
Carolina, and Tennessee, among other states,
though many Cherokees are identified today
with Oklahoma, to which they had been
forcibly removed by treaty in the 1830s, or
with the lands of the Eastern Band of
Cherokees in western North Carolina. The
largest of the so-called Five Civilized
Tribes, which also included Choctaws,
Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, the
Cherokees were the first tribe to have a
written language, and by 1820 they had even
adopted a form of government resembling that
of the United States.
It is a lesser known fact
that there was considerably more
intermarriage between Cherokees and Whites
than any other tribe, so they have a
genealogical significance far out of
proportion to their historical numbers.
There is also a great deal of genealogical
data on the Cherokees, mostly in the form of
census records and enrollment records. All
of which is to point out the abundance of
sources available to Emmet Starr when he
came to pen his classic History of the
Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and
Folklore.
Not to diminish Mr. Starr's
contribution in writing about the early
Cherokees, their constitution, treaties with
the federal government, land transactions,
school system, migration and resettlement,
committees, councils, and officials,
religion, language, and culture, and a host
of other topics upon which he writes
eloquently, but his stated purpose in
writing the History was "to make it as near
a personal history and biography of as many
Cherokees as possible." And in fact more
than half the book is devoted to genealogies
and biographies, of which there are several
hundred. The biographies in particular, each
averaging a paragraph or more, are
noteworthy for their focus on the
genealogical events of birth, marriage, and
death over a period of several generations,
naming thousands of related individuals in a
classic roll-call of family members.
The references appearing in
parenthesis at the beginning of each
paragraph following the name refers to the
connection among the foregoing old families.
Source: History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore,
Emmet Starr, 1921, The Warden Company, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Online Publication: The manuscript was scanned and
then ocr'd. Minimal editing has been done, and readers can and should expect
some errors in the textual output.
This site includes some historical materials that may imply negative
stereotypes reflecting the culture or language of a particular period or place.
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