My personal genealogy quest has hit a roadblock trying to prove a great-grandmother was an American-Indian. She lived as a white woman and took the truth to her grave :( but she couldn't hide the inherited black hair and dark skin our family still passes down.
One of the problems, early on, was that my grandfather, born in April 1880, was shown on the census of 1880, but in a name nothing like his adopted name. One suspects the last named used in the census of 1880 was the last name of his father, but has no way of knowing for certain.
why was no one offended by her having children out of wedlock?
To me, this has always been the most remarkable part of the story. Clarion County was a small county at the time, and everybody knew everything there was to know, about everybody else. My grandmother, who went to school as a child with my grandfather, for example, explicitly knew his background (as did everyone else).
But there apparently was no social stigma attached to the whole thing, my great-grandmother not having to "pay" any "penalty" for having children out of wedlock, and my grandfather and his half-sister not having to "pay" any "penalty" for being born outside of marriage.
It's a mystery; there's probably other factors here that I don't know.
I found my family names (cherokee) on the Indian roll calls.
I think marrying an Indian back then was considered a no no. My husband has a similar story from his family. When his great aunt was very old and near death she admitted to him that there had been an Indian grandmother. But don’t worry she said, she was a white folks kind of Indian.
My great grandmother was a Cherokee Indian but that is all we have been able to find out. We did discover that her children had been offered land in OK but they did not take it. All but one lived in MS.
Do your great-grandmother’s descendants have the Mongolian mark that native American babies have?
My husband’s great-grandmother was half Native American and although she swore she was French, everyone knew it. What no one knew is that his great-grandfather was some portion Cherokee.
What a long, lost cousin has told us is to look in the records for “Black Dutch” that this is a euphemism for Native American/European. That might have only been in Tennessee though. The last name that we share is definitely Scotch, not Dutch. I know this probably won’t help but it might.