I am researching the McCarty line. I have taken my DNA test from Ancestry.com and confirmed my native american blood line, but can’t complete the link.
Charles McCarty 1871-1934 Born in Missouri, lived in Illinois
Marcus McCarty 1830-1906 Born in Eddyville, KY
wife: Louisa Wood
John Lee McCarty (????-1860) Born in VA, died in Indiana
wife: Mary Hariss (1803-1881) Born in VA, died in TN
I’m looking for a bloodline link for this family to anyone on the Dawes Rolls. Thank you.
DNA tests can be helpful to establish straight lines of descent. There are mtDNA or Y-DNA tests. But, autosmoal “admixture tests” have to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes, people with verifiable non-Native ancestry can even get “Native American” results. This is common in recent immigrant families with eastern European or Jewish ancestry. This is because those sequences can be shared across populations and are not restricted. So, they are calibrated to give a probability of ancestry coming from a particular source. Also, they do have a margin of error with just random recombination of genes.
But, as far as looking for links to individuals on Dawes, you have to realize that everyone on that roll was either living in Indian Territory (Cherokee Nation), were re-admitted Eastern Cherokee, or represented a very small number of Texas band members that appeared before the Commission in the late 1890s through early 1907. You had to physically be in that location and maintain or prove affiliation with the nation, in other words.
There were never any villages or communities of Cherokees living in VA or KY, during the colonial era. The Cherokees were able to lay claim to territory by military and political strength, but they didn’t settle in those areas. For context, the last land cessions in extreme southeast Virginia took place in 1775. That is when all land claims within that state were ceded by treaty. There were some Cherokee raids on frontier settlements in this location for a little while afteward, but the last war party and foray into Virginia, by an organized group of Eastern Cherokees was in 1794, when Chief Benge was defeated in battle by Virginia militiamen.
Likewise, Kentucky was also never settled by Cherokee. There were never any communties or large villages in that location. Most lands in this state were ceded by 1772 and 1775. A small sliver in south central was ceded in 1805. That was the last Cherokee claim in that state.
This is important to understand when you are looking at a distant ancestor born in VA in 1803. There would be no Cherokee communities for this person to come from, so it is the “wrong place and the wrong time.” If they were Cherokee, they’d have to come from further south, from the actual Cherokee settlements that existed in a given time and place. It appears the family moved to other areas that also had no Cherokee communities. So, being born in Eddyville, KY in 1830 would represent a solidly non-Cherokee environment and reality. Likewise, for the descendant born in Missouri in the 1870s…this would have been a landscape nearly devoid of Native Americans. They had all been kicked out of the state by that time, save the small number of mixedblood families that were able to pass in White society and didn’t maintain tribal affiliation.
I’ll give you a further example. Say a Cherokee woman ias born about 1870 and found on Dawes. She is found enumerated in 1900, living in Cherokee Nation/Indian Territory. She is 30 years old. Her theoretical lineage would be as follows: her parents were born in the 1840s, in Indian Territory. Her grandparents were born in the 1810s and 20s, in northern Georgia. They came over on the Trail of Tears in 1839 with their families. The families are found in the 1835 Henderson Roll, enumerated as living in Georgia.The family then can be found in the Reservation Roll in 1817. There would be very few people on the Dawes Roll that would be related to anyone that had old roots in VA, KY and MO. The scenario would represent an individual that had moved into Virginia, likely in the 1700s or early 1800s before various roll enumerations took place, and then offspring and descendants of subsuequent generations did not live in Cherokee communities. That would be quite abberational and uncommon. And any link to Cherokees that maintained affiliation and were enumerated on Dawes in the 1890s and early 1900s would be very remote in that kind of scneario. In our theoritical situation, the Dawes enrollee female born in 1870s, would be removed from the distant Cherokee that left the tribe and lived in White society 100 years earlier and made a life in VA, KY, MO, IL, etc.