For those of you who are able to trace their ancestry back to another country...

[wnylib]

77. I would not know as much about my grandmother's Seneca ancestry

if she had not had a well-kbown and therefore, traceable, Seneca ancestor.

Prior to 1900, there were no birth certificates for Native Americans, and even after that for many of them. Most Native Americans lived apart from white society, in their own villages or on reservations. Some tribes kept their own records once they began using the English writing system. That varies from tribe to tribe.

Prior to writing, in some cultural traditions, they could recite their family information by clan membership and know their relationships to each other. But that got disrupted by relocations, mass killings, and boarding schools.

Even European-American records of births, marriages, and deaths were not recorded as civil records in many locations and states until the late 1800s or later. People relied on churches for those records. Newspaper articles are good sources for that info, too, in genealogy research.

If you want to trace your grandmother, you'll need to be creative, but you still might not find much since there are so few records of Native people. If you know her tribe, you can contact their tribal offices for advice or help. Some are more cooperative than others.

If you don't know her tribe, look for a record of your grandfather's marriage. Where they lived might help identify the tribe. Census record searches can help to locate where they lived. They might say where she was born. Keep in mind, though, that census takers wrote what they thought they heard and sometimes spelled names wrong. My aunt told me what she found when she was looking up an ancestor named Gottlieb Herd who was German Swiss, born in Bern, Switzerland. Due to his accent, the census taker wrote what it sounded like to him - Cutlip Herd from Bear, Germany.

Also, the person who spoke to the census taker might have had some information wrong.

Many libraries have subscriptions to Ancestry.com and other genealogy sites that are free to their patrons. You can check census and other records there. Beware of trusting family trees posted there, though. A lot of them are not accurate and need to be verified.

If she was from one of the 5 tribes that were relocated on the Trail of Tears, there are records of the individuals by name and tribe. The largest is the Dawes Roll, but there are others. Some escaped relocation by hiding out in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. Today their descendants are the Eastern Band of Cherokee.

Those tribes were relocated to Oklahoma, but so were many other tribal members There are even some Seneca and Oneida people in Oklahoma.

DNA might help to find relatives if they have done DNA testing, too. Quite a few Native Americans do Dna testing because a lot of Native people have some European ancestry in their families and want to know who they are.

Good luck.

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