Exploring the question of “when” is at the heart of what I do as an ancestral roots researcher. Our focus is, of course, upon the ancestral and historical past, and upon the connections between them. For example, when was an ancestor born, when did she get married, when did she move from one place to another, and when did she die? These are all important questions about the past, about time in the linear sense: “that was then, this is now.”
Let me share a specific example with you. The date June 22, 1839, is a very important one in my mother’s family history. To paraphrase the late Buddy Holly, “that’ll be the day” when three important leaders of the Cherokee Nation’s Treaty Party died. On one of the darkest days in American history that few people know about, these three men were executed by other citizens of the Cherokee Nation for signing the Treaty of New Echota, which ceded the Cherokee Nation’s remaining lands in the Southeast to the federal government, in exchange for lands in the Indian Territory (later northeastern Oklahoma).
As I learned by doing in-depth genealogical and historical research, my relative Nancy Gentry Little and her family had a “front row seat” upon this important date in history. In 1850, Nancy’s daughter Angeline Little was attending a missionary school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with Flora Ridge, Susan Wheeler, and several other white and mixedblood Cherokee girls. On June 21, 1839, Flora’s grandfather Major Ridge spent the night in Sylva, Arkansas Territory, with Ambrose Harnage, a close neighbor of the Gentry/Little family.
Early the next morning, Major Ridge was executed on the Arkansas/Cherokee Nation border. At the same time, but in a different place nearby, Flora’s father John Ridge was also killed.
The 1840 and 1850 federal censuses both contain the evidence that supports the assertions made in the paragraph above. Nancy Gentry Little was not a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, but she was of Cherokee descent. Her classmate Flora Ridge was a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, but only because her family changed the Cherokee Nation’s laws so that children of white women married to Cherokee men could officially be citizens of the Cherokee Nation. Flora’s mother was Sarah Bird Northrup. She was European American.
White women did not belong to any of the Cherokees’ seven traditional matrilineal clans. In traditional Cherokee worldview, if your mother didn’t belong to a clan, then neither did you. Got a clan? Then you are Cherokee.
Although “time travel” (the when) is at the heart and soul of what we do in researching the past, time is mainly important because of how it relates to the present and the future. Without that living relationship, the past is dead, rather than alive. I experience history as something that is still living, but alive in a way that is different from the life that it experienced in “the past.”
The research and consulting work that we do at Ancestral Roots Consulting (ARC) is ultimately about making the past present again, bringing history and our ancestors back into the NOW, as a means of possibly changing the future, possibly for the better.
The work that we do is about reconnecting and restoring hidden or forgotten relationships between people in the past (our ancestors) and people living in the present (us). The goal is to become the ancestors of our own descendants, who are depending upon us for their own lives.
For me personally, the goal is also to earn a decent living—a “right livelihood”—but more broadly the goal of this work is to help others to become the ancestors of their descendants, by reconnecting life-giving relationships between the past, present, and future.
When do we begin this important work? Now!, or whenever the time is right.