If you think for one second that this story doesn't involve someone claiming their secretly Native American great-granddaddy done got stolen out of a tent as an infant, then you are fooling yourself. Fooling yourself, I say. Because, boy howdy, does it ever.
Ahem.
The year was 1906. The U.S. government had apparently been taking land from Native Americans for decades despite binding legal documents that explicitly stated they would not do such a thing. Did you guys know about this?* Turns out, we would sign a treaty with "the Indians" and say we will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever take this land that you're on right now and push you further west, cross our hearts, hope to die. Never would we take this beautiful, arable land that you've already been pushed to from your ancestral... hang on, is that a riverbed? Is there a... a water source close by? Gosh, that's convenient. These plants sure seem happy. What's that? You said grains do well out here? That's... eh... hmm... No, I'm not writing that down, I'm just... doodling. Yes."
Cut to a few years later...
And here comes Mr. Twenty Dollar Bill. You put a guy on your paper money and he thinks he can get away with literal murder. After decades of this business, the federal government agreed to hear the Cherokees in court and to compensate them. They held up their hands, said, "Oh-ho-kay! You got us, you got us! We weren't really gonna let you keep that land... our bad." And then they took out their big ol' wallet and said, "Listen, how about, uhhhhh, $133.33 for all the descendants of Cherokees forced west? Is that cool? Are we cool?"
It wasn't cool, but that's what happened. The feds quickly realized they would need a method for confirming claimants had Cherokee ancestry, and so they did what governments do best: they created a form.
About 125,000 people applied for compensation, though only about 30,000 were approved in court. The applications, both those rejected and approved, survive today, however, and they are outstanding sources of genealogical information. The man in charge of this process was special commissioner Guion Miller, whose name is still associated with the resultant list and the applications.
What does any of this have to do with stolen tent babies? Well...
Here's where we meet the ever-cheerful, life-of-the-party, couple-of-the-hour, Leroy Hooker & Lucy Ann Newman, my third great-grandparents. She'd wave, but she's wearing four pairs of gloves.
Leroy and Lucy were just a couple of crazy cats living near the North Carolina/Virginia border in the mid-1800s. Leroy was—and stop me if you've heard this before—a farmer, and Lucy, you guessed it, "kept house."
Now, in 1907, Leroy heard about that Guion Miller business and immediately called to mind rumors of his Cherokee origins. He felt compelled to wave his cane in the air and see if $133.33 might make its way into his bank account... or, we're guessing, the jars buried underneath his front porch.
Sadly, his application was rejected, but it gives us invaluable information.
Leroy Hooker's Guion Miller application lists six of his ten siblings, his parents' names and places of birth, and his grandparents' names. This is a genealogical goldmine, especially given the time period in which it was created. One of the main sources for confirming grandparents in this time period would typically be a will, as the census didn't list individual household members prior to 1850. However, if your ancestors—like mine—were too poor to have had a will, this information would have been lost if not for this application.
So check out the Guion Miller Rolls in the National Archive to see if your people applied.
But wait! You came here for a baby-stolen-from-the-tent story (at least, I hope you did), and baby-stolen-from-the-tent story is what.you.shall.get.
Part of the collection of the Guion Miller rolls is a series of sworn depositions providing additional details to support these folks' claims of Cherokee identity. In the case of Leroy Hooker, this is where things get good.
But first, real quick, we have to meet Elizabeth Pike. Born a Hooker (please, please, no jokes, we've heard them all), she came into the world about 1852. Or 1850. She says both in her application and deposition. In her defense, she was terrible with dates as a newborn. Her death certificate is real, real wrong, however, as it estimates her birth year as 1866, putting her at about six years old when she married James Pike in 1872. 1866 is also the birth year put on her tombstone, which is BONKERS. This is why tombstones are great sources for determining when people died and not when they were born.
Child-bride Elizabeth had a whole story about her Cherokee ancestry that she was ready to share with the world, and our man Leroy hitched right on to her wagon, because they had wagons back then.
All I can say is that I hope multi-generational "stolen from the tent" trauma explains a lot of issues I personally experience today, and I fully plan on exploring this further with my therapist.
The moral of the story is this: a record is only as good as the source providing the information. When considering a source, ask yourself the pertinent questions. How close to the event was the record created? Did the person giving the information possibly have ulterior motives? Was stolen-tent-baby money on the line?
Etching something in stone is only an indication of its permanence, not its veracity. And old documents can provide us with great stories but their truth is another matter altogether.
Rest in peace, Lucy and Leroy.
*We are, of course, only kidding. Learn the facts about the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears. You can go back up to where you were here.
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