Oct06
Chowanoke Indians
This past month I haven’t really done that much Genealogy, but what little I have has focused on finding the ancestors of William Vaughan’s wife, Fereby Benton. I’ve been looking at the Chowanoke (or Chowanock) Indians of North Carolina, a tribe that slowly disappeared by the first part of the 19th century. They were the first Indian tribe in America to have a reservation, this one being around Bennet (or Bennett) Creek, in current Gates County, NC. The reservation was slowly given away by the Headmen of the Chowanoke, until there were only a handful of families left. The man who I believe was Fereby Benton’s ancestor owned land that bordered the reservation. Surprisingly, I have two other ancestors that also owned land next to the reservation, and these three families were not connected to each other. Some of the Chowanoke Indians that were the last of the tribe were the Hoyters and Freemans. I’m working ever so slowly on a theory that most of the Chowanoke Indians simply disappeared into white society, mostly by inter-marriage with white families. I also suspect that they were one of the tribe that gave some of their identity to the Melungeons of Eastern Tennessee. I was surprised to find that many smaller Indian tribes simply vanished. The Chowanoke were swallowed up by another tribe that moved to upstate New York, but from the deed records I’ve looked at, a small number remained and inter-married with white (and probably black) families and lost their tribal identity.
What I suspect remained were future generations that descend from these lost Indians having vague stories of an Indian ancestor. I think many times the names of the tribes were lost and so “new” names were given to them. For example, I suspect Fereby’s family began telling that she was part Cherokee, because no one had heard of the Chowanoke and the two names sound so similar that a descendant grew confused and passed down the wrong tribe.
Even if this is not what happened in Fereby’s case I bet there are white — and black– families out there today that descend from the Chowanoke Indians.
It is a fascinating new possibility and I’m learning a lot about these “lost” tribes.
Eddie Davis