Sarah was a full blooded Cherokee born in Tennessee in the mid 1800’s. She was my great grand mother on my fathers side—how can I find out about her linage?
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All Things Cherokee is an online resource for Cherokee genealogy information, history, culture, and art.
Lineage is clarified by doing standard genealogy. Basically, you build a tree starting from yourself and move back through time, adding generations to the tree only when you have verified records or documents that prove each connection. Usually, you’ll be able to fill in the details to parents and grandparents rather easily with existing records in your possession (or those of parents). As you move back, you’ll probably be able to start using more open source records, such as census records and variously publicly available databases. Once you’ve built a detailed tree and can get a sense for where families originated, or came from, their social and political affiliations will tend to be clarified as well. In other words, you can look at a family unit and see where they fit into society, how they were listed in records (White/Black/Indian,etc.), the towns they lived in, what groups or organizations they were members of, etc.
In this case, you might want to post about the great-grandmother in question with some of her details and see if anyone can help you with this process. You’ll need some basic info to make sure that the research is tracing the correct ancestors. Or, if she is not well-known, you can start from her children or more recent descendants. Basically, you need a good starting point for researchers to begin investigating and compiling accurate records.
Also, when doing research that has a potential Cherokee connection, you can look at the tribal socio-politcal and historical context as well. This means looking at the population or demographics of the tribal communities at a given time or place, and looking at tribal rolls taken at very points in Cherokee history. For example, you might be able to clarify that in the mid-1800s, there were only a handful of fullblood Cherokee families living in Tennessee after 1839, and this was restricted to the extreme southeast part of the state, representing just a few counties (which were formerly part of Cherokee Nation East before Removal). This small community mostly moved out of the state in subsequent decades, either moving to Indian Territory, or joining the coalescing Eastern Band around what is now called Qualla Boundary, NC. Outside of just a few dozen full individuals living in these very tiny and distinct communities, having a 4/4 ancestor born in TN in the mid-1800s would be very unique. And even if they were living outside of these known clusters, they would still have to come from these lineages. The population of eastern Cherokee that remained in the east after Removal would represent just a few thousand people. So, it is a very, very small pool of ancestors that any modern Cherokee descendant could tie back to. This makes Cherokee genealogy quite distinct.