tom

This is the last family history/DNA-related post I will bore you with. But I have this information floating around in my head, and this seems like the best place to put it so I can move on with my many things to do. It concerns my great grandfather Tom Pittman, and his ancestry.

As a child I was obsessed with Native Americans, and of course would have loved to have joined any random tribe just so that I could have an excuse for my obsession. As I have found out doing genealogy, a lot of other people are just like me, and wonder about their links to a fabled "Cherokee princess" (and they are always Cherokees and always princesses, by the way). So, searching for Tom's ancestry, I immediately come across people researching similar surnames in the same region who also talk about Native American roots. I am not unique.

I am not sure if Tom really looks like an "Indian." He does to me, at least a little. He does to some other people who have seen his photo. And, obsession aside, most of the images I have of him leave me thinking, "That guy is just not English." Maybe there are a lot of Englishmen who look like that, but I haven't met them. So I have spent a lot of time researching this guy's ancestry, trying to find out anything.

The truth is that he really is English, at least mostly. Tom's father's side, the Pittmans, Battles, Scoggins, and Majettes, is, as far as I could trace it, completely of English extraction, maybe with some Irish, Welsh, or French Huguenot settlers mixed in.

What is so great about this kind of research is that it puts you in touch with history that you know very little about. A great deal of the settlers to the Virginia colony arrived in the mid-17th century. Why? Because there was a civil war going on in England. Especially when the cavaliers lost to Oliver Cromwell, the colony absorbed men. Coincidentally, the royalist stronghold was in western England, so many of the families from which Tom descended came from places like Dorset, Somerset, and Devon. It's one of the reasons why the Tidewater Virginia accent and the West Country accent sound similar.

There's something else you should know. There were a lot of men in the colony, but not a lot of women. One historian estimates it as one woman for every eight men. More on that later ...

So, that was his father's side. His mother's side is the one that gets all those Native American hits, especially surrounding his mother's maiden name, Collins.Tom's mother's name was Martha Lydia Collins. She was about 20 years old when he was born in 1896. Her father's name was Hugh Collins. He was a captain in the Virginia cavalry in the Civil War. Hugh's father's name was Graham Collins. He was born in about 1800 on the Virginia side of the Virginia-North Carolina border, near the Great Dismal Swamp. Graham's parents were Thomas Collins and Anna Russell. That's as far back as I can go.

The stories about the Great Dismal Swamp are fascinating, Supposedly it held thousands of runaway slaves who formed their own towns. Don't forget, Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion occurred in Southampton County, Virginia in the 1830s, just one county to the west. That's what I mean, when I say that this family history stuff can rope you in.

Graham Collins had two brothers, Elvy and Thomas. On all documents, they are listed as white, except Elvy's death certificate, where he is listed as "colored." It's the same story with their uncle, one Elvy Russell (1792-1857), who is white in every census but "colored" on his death certificate. When I saw that second certificate, I thought, "Okay, this wasn't just a clerical error."!

Here is another interesting issue -- ideas about race in the South. It wasn't always so, well, black and white. In the 17th century, there were free, slave-owning landowners of African descent. "Colored" was anybody of color -- Native Americans, Africans, workers brought from the East Indies. And, yes, at that time, there were some marriages with Native Americans, because the Native Americans owned the land, and if you married some one of significance's daughter, that could make you very wealthy overnight. One day, you are some poor English chump, the next day you've got it made. Think about it.

Some of these marriages were recorded, others are speculated about ("Hey, how did that guy get all that land right next to the reservation?") The truth is that the records from this era are very poor. The courthouse in the county where Tom's ancestors were mostly located burned in the American Revolution and in the Civil War. I'll probably never find something that says, "Yes!" or "No!" And local memory has eradicated all traces of the native population. They are "extinct," and have been for quite some time, end of story.

The local native populations were fascinating in themselves. There were three linguistic families in the region: Algonquians, Iroquoians, and Siouans. The land in the vicinity of where Tom's ancestors came from was populated by Algonquian-speakers. Two very large tribes, the Weapemeoc/Yeopim and the Chowan/Chowanoke, managed to vanish within a span of about 70 years. The official story is that they intermarried with the local communities, some became "white," others became "black." The problem is that there are almost no records to show it, and two hundred years of racist social divisions in the South kept many mouths shut, which leaves people like me, searching in vain for that "Cherokee princess."

So, to end, I honestly don't know if Tom had native ancestry or not. I probably never will. But he does kind of look like an Indian. At least I sometimes think so.