My dad was part Indian. Just what tribe and how much has been a matter of debate as long as I can remember. It seems as though there are a dozen different stories floating around my extended family. At some point I figured out the stories about Indian ancestry are concentrated around Rachel (Roberson) Horn, my grandmother’s grandmother. Rachel herself does not seem to have been Indian. The...
Rachel Roberson has consumed a lot of my genealogical research time. She is supposed to have been Indian, or perhaps part Indian. I’ve wanted to find some answers but now years of research have given me so much information it seems almost impossible to say anything helpful. She was Rachel (Roberson) Horne (1847-1944), my grandmother’s grandmother. More exactly, my father’s...
According to a tradition current among some of my cousins, my great great grandmother Rachel (Roberson) Horne (1847-1944) was Pawnee. I don’t think so. Nothing else points in that direction. I asked my grandmother Evelyn (Horn) Miller one year at Powwow about our Indian ancestry. She said she had always assumed they were Pawnee. A few years later she told her daughter Fern she had lately...
Some of my Horn and Roberson ancestors were buried in Bush Cemetery in Rock Port, Missouri. There’s nothing remarkable about that. It’s no different from the hundreds of little cemeteries across America where my ancestors are buried. Some of them maintained, some not. What makes this one special is that there’s a guy who is making it his project to clean up the cemetery. Matt...
White Americans love to say they’re part Cherokee. Experts say identifying as Cherokee gives people a feeling of being native to America, but that doesn’t explain how they get the idea. There are a lot of theories here, as you might expect. RF Tree Genealogy suggests many of these people have Melungeon ancestry. The Melungeons were mixed race communities in the area around Cumberland...