I have noticed that more and more information about our ancestors is lost every generation. I’ve heard time and time again the variations of the story about how William Vaughan was a a Welsh trader with the Cherokee Indians and how he married Fereby, a Cherokee Princess. But even this much told story is becoming more and more diluted. Newer Genealogists simply remember a story about a trader with the Indians who took a wife from the tribe. Some don’t even claim Cherokee. In a way, it is somewhat sad that we fail to interest the next generation with our distant ancestry. I’ve often wondered what the original stories about William and Fereby really were, when they told their children. Did they embellish the tales, did they just flat-out lie, or did they tell the honest truth, but the tales were warped with time? I don’t know if we will really ever know.
I spent several days last week going through Chowanoke Indian information, and it still seems the most probable lead for finding Fereby’s Indian connection, but the lack of records for the early colonial period means that there is very scant evidence of any of the tribe. Apparently several of the Chowanoke remained on the land and intermarried with both black and white families. I had several ancestors (unconnected to each other at the time) that lived on land that either once belonged to the tribe, or that bordered the last members of the tribe. Often there was rocky relations between the whites and the Chowanokes, who dwindled fast in number — if you go by cold, neutral records.
From bits and pieces, found on the Internet, I have theorized that many of the Chowanoke and other tiny tribes that seemed to disappear, simply intermarried into white families and “became” white — or in some cases, intermarried into black families with the same result. I think this is why so many people have those “Indian princess” stories in their family legends. I suspect this was some way of simply stating that grandma was of some unknown tribe somewhere back in her history, to the point that the effects of time had dimmed the exact tribe.
I think Cherokee was selected as the tribe that “granny’s people” were part of, simply because (at least in SW Missouri where I live) it is the largest, best known tribe. In reality, there are probably thousands of descendants of Chowokes and related tribes of colonial VA and NC that are trying with great frustration and no success to find their ancestor on Cherokee rolls. The Chowanoke never really disappeared at all, I suspect, they simply became diluted into the white communities (and black communities), and the effects of time did the rest.
Eddie Davis