I was told by members of my family that my great great grandfather Bailey from Pennsylvania / Ohio was married to a full blood Cherokee women. I was also told a picture of them is somewhere in our family but so far I have been unable to locate it. The Baileys were our great great grandparents of the Harley side of the family. The GG granparents were born sometime in the 1850s-1870s. Any help would be appreciated.
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
A genealogical query needs to have more specifics in order to begin building a tree, or researching specific lineages. As it stands now, this is just a single Bailey family that moved around PA and OH sometime in the 1850s-1870s. That would include tens of thousands of people.
However, based on the scenario you’ve described, it would be highly unlikely that a White man from PA or OH would be meeting up with a full blood Cherokee woman living in those areas in the 1870s – 1890s (adjusting for age of marriage).
Cherokee full bloods represented just under 8,000 living in Indian Territory at the turn of the century and a few thousands living in extreme western North Carolina. They lived in very tight-knit communities, and you wouldn’t be finding a lot of 4/4 bloods living outside of these areas, far from their communities, living in White society. It’s not technically impossible, but highly aberrational and statistically unlikely. There were no Cherokee communities living in OH or PA in that time period.