An Interesting Day!

The search continues for my Native American ancestry. I did some research last night on "Dragging Canoe", but it only added to my questions instead of answering any. According to my family tree in Ancestry.com (and others on the same site), he has a daughter named Abigail "Raven" Canoe. I decided to try and see if there was a list of his children on any internet site and I kept getting various numbers, ranging from one to four children. None of these searches turned up the name of Abigail "Raven" Canoe. This leads me to believe that either he has more children that aren't listed, this daughter is listed with a different name, or they are not related at all.

I did more searching this morning on Cherokee Indians in general and came across the name of a professor at the University of North Carolina, named Theda Perdue, who happens to be an expert in Native American History. The name Perdue/Pardue also pops up in my family tree, but I don't think she is any relation (direct, at least). Anyway, she is also an author with numerous books about the Cherokee people, including a book about "The Trail of Tears". In my moment of desperation, I decided to email her to see if she can point me in some direction to begin a search for this part of my family tree. We'll see what happens!

Meanwhile, my wife Stephanie and I decided to take a trip to some nearby cemeteries to find the headstones of some of her relatives. We came across quite a few that she had on her list. We learned pretty quick, though,  that you can't rely on "Google" to give you accurate addresses and directions to some of these places that are out in the middle of nowhere. There was one cemetery we couldn't find at all, which was in an extremely small town and another that goes by two names. We asked a couple of people (one of them a mailman) about how to get to "New Hope Cemetery" in Liberty, Missouri. He didn't know where that was, but gave us directions to another cemetery closeby. Turns out, we were trying to trace a cemetery that really doesn't exist, so our haphazard search in this particular cemetery turned up nothing. We didn't look hard, because we thought it was the wrong place. Turns out, it was the right place with the wrong name. haha...We now have more accurate information and will resume the search in these two cemeteries during the coming week.

After we got back home, we started doing more searches on her family, which a good portion of are in Caldwell County, Missouri. I came across an "ebook" on compact discs called "Caldwell County, Missouri Genealogy History" on Ebay. The company that made them happens to be in Joplin, Missouri, which, as you know, was devastated by a tornado on May 22, 2011. On the company's website, it said that they weren't damaged by the tornado and were still carrying on, business as usual. I talked Steph into buying a copy, because it listed a whole lot of different information that was on the cds. Hopefully, she will come across something that will be of use to her, as her Caldwell County family members have quite a history. At least I hope it's interesting!

And so.........the search continues!