Legend has it that Edith Love of St. Clair County, Alabama, in Shoal Creek Valley near Ashville, was half Cherokee, but there’s no DNA or physical records to prove it that I have found so far. May Loves are mentioned in books about the Cherokee, so I assume many tribe members who hid from the Trail of Tears exodus used that name and integrated into white society through schools and churches. Has anyone else found evidence about this?
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There was an Edith Love of St. Clair Co, born in 1892 (died 1978) who married a Robert Wilson. Is this the right person?
If so, her parents were Richard Patton Love and Annie McGuire.
https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?dbid=60525&h=31563500&indiv=try&o_vc=Record:OtherRecord&rhSource=7884
I can’t yet confirm we are talking about the same person of course, but if this IS correct, these folks were not Cherokee. This particular Love family went back to early colonial roots in South Carolina. The progenitor was an Irishman named Robert Love, born in County Antrim in 1713.
Also, as and FYI, the Love surname was not really common within the Cherokee community. In 1835, on the Henderson Roll, there was only one family with this surname, headed by a John Love. That was it. It was not found in the Siler or Chapman Rolls of the 1850s, or the Hester Roll of 1884. There were just 18 individuals from this extended family listed out West on the Drennen Rolls (meaning, they had been removed). But, this Love lineage from Robert Patton Love doesn’t connect to the Cherokee Love family, that had resided in North Carolina and were removed in the Trail of Tears.
In fact, there were no Cherokee families with that surname residing in the Alabama section of the Cherokee Nation east. Additionally, less that 100 Cherokees remained in that state after Removal. This didn’t include any known full blood family units, and represented just a handful that were half-bloods. Most were 1/4 to 1/8 (or less). You wouldn’t find anyone from these Alabama-based remnant Cherokee clusters who was half blood born from the latter half of the 1800s onward. Again, that’s just the historical and demographic context. Not everyone named Loved is closely related (or related at all). That’s why you have to trace the genealogy more specifically. I’d recommend re-posting with more specific information (or reply in a comment) so researchers can narrow down the ancestor in question.
Thanks for the reply. The dates seem right for birth and death for Edith, but my grandfather’s name was Lother Wilson, not Robert. Also, they were members of the Greensport Baptist Church, not a Methodist church. They had a son named Curtis who died on Okinawa in WWII, and a son named Eschol, my father.
Oh, I see in Ancestry.