Crowe’s Nest by Elizabeth Powell Crowe

Kay Rudolph and Cheryl Rothwell have been helping me with this hunt! Big, big thanks to both of them!

Kay started looking in newspaper databases for the obit of Elizabeth (Betsie) Perkins Jolley, but she found “but dead ends. Genealogy Bank doesn’t have any Kentucky papers covering 1878; they have some Owensboro M-I but only for 1988 onward. The Newspaper Archive, Chronicling America, Google newspapers … zip, zip, zip. University of Kentucky has paper copies for 1877-1879, but that’s a long trip with little guarantee of rewards. If Constantine was full-blooded native American, would he have been able to pass as white?”

I was having the same experience. As far as Lexington, we still have friends and family living in Louisville and Elizabethtown so that is not impossible, perhaps sometime this summer…. On the census question, I read this on the NARA site today: “Prior to 1900 few Indians are included in the decennial Federal census. Indians are not identified in the 1790-1840 censuses. In 1860, Indians living in the general population are identified for the first time.”

and…

“The Eastern Band of Cherokees traces its origin to the more than 1,000 Cherokee members who eluded forced movement westward in 1838-39 by remaining in the mountains. Approximately 300 of these individuals were living on tribal lands in 1838 and claimed U.S. citizenship. Other tribal members living in Tennessee and North Carolina towns were not immediately found and removed.”

So if they have been living side by side with the Europeans since before the ToT, maybe the census enumerator didn’t ask and the Perkins/Jolly families didn’t tell?

Cheryl pointed out to me that several censuses exist of the Eastern Tribes of Native Americans and sent me this link:

http://www.censusfinder.com/

I’m going to be poking around there a lot in the near future.

Finally, I got some clues from DuckDuckGo, a search engine that is good at finding people. The latest edition of Ancestor Searching from the Huntsville Public Library (a MUST READ) pointed this search engine out to me.

It worked so well that I almost immediately hit upon someone also descended from Elizabeth and Joe Jolley. However, in reply to my email, he said, “I’m sorry that I can’t offer any proof of descent from the Cherokee Jollys. I have often heard older family members claim we are descended from Indian blood, but I have never found any proof.”

Sigh It may be next Monday before I blog on this again, but stay tuned!

Today I’m going to explore some different sites in my quest for the Jolly/Perkins family.

First, On AncestralFindings.com, I am going to ask for a lookup in the Early Kentucky Settlers, 1700s-1800s database.

Next, I’ll prowl around the Kentucky Genealogy and Hard to Find Surnames queries pages there.

There are several laws of genealogy that shove the poor family historian around like a comet flying by Jupiter. One such law of genealogy is this:
When you are looking hard at family B, something from Family A will pop up to distract you. This is the “Ooh, Shiny Genealogy” rule.

And this law hit me yesterday. I was poking around Ancestry.com looking for more on the Perkins and Jolly families that MIGHT be our Cherokee connections, when behold! Ancestry told me of some activity on a possibly related tree: a photograph of the Jessie Daniel Crowe family.

And here it is:

Now anyone who knows my husband’s family will immediately see this is indeed my husbands great-great-grandfather in the center and his great grandfather in the back row.

So I spent another hour on the Crowes instead of on the Jollys and Perkins’. Sigh.

Today, I’m back on the hunt!