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Hey guys.
Thought you might find this an interesting URL:
It provides Thomas Jefferson’s notes on the tribes of Virginia. The entire web site deals with disappearing Indians : http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/lewisandclark/students/projects/monacans/index.html
Techteach
Techteach, Thank you for that post. It is very interesting. I noticed that in the glossary it stated that Saponi and Tutelo were essentially the same name as Monacan. I found that also very interesting. I’m beggining to believe that the Tuckahoe Indians were actually Monacan. Can’t prove it yet but maybe I can in the near future.
Techteach,
Interesting websites!My family has roots in Albemarle and Fluvanna COs,VA which,according to these sites,have been areas of Monacan/Saponi habitation.
Thanks!
:)Roca
Yes, it’s very interesting, I’ve never read Jefferson on the subject. Funny how we started out with such intelligent presidents with great breadths of knowledge, and have gone steadily downhill. Never mind, this is no place for politics.
The table is baffling. So many tribes I’ve never heard of before, and grouped together so haphazardly, as in putting the Tutelo together with the Meherrin. Still, the details about the burial mounds is interesting. I believe this practice, of interring bones communally, has something to do with the values of community. As if to say, our fate for eternity is to sort of meld together into one whole. Needless to say, these mounds would have been incredibly sacred to the people related to the people buried there. How inhumanly they’ve been treated by the alien invaders.
In the Hillsborough digs of Piedmont Siouan people, graves were found right under the ati’s where people lived. Sort of a way to keep your loved ones close at hand. Perhaps that was the old tradition, and later, at some set time, all the bones were disinterred and buried together. Perhaps that had something to do with how transient villages were. They followed the fertile land, and shifted location every twenty years or so as fields under cultivation were rotated. If so, a burial mound might be a way to keep track of where all your dead were, since the memory of the exact sites of old villages may be lost over time.
I have a hand-written manuscript from the 30’s, written by a young archeologist, reporting on his dig of a mound in Juniata County, PA. It appears the mound was built by Delaware, I believe, he reasoned, without much evidence. There was a local story that the man who owned the field in which the mound was situated, was annoyed with the way it hindered his cultivation of the field, so he very aggressively plowed it down. It was rumored that he went to the extreme of pulverizing the bones and spreading the powder as fertilizer.
He died a year or two later of some horrible cancer and the neighborhood gossip was that it was his just rewards for desecrating that mass grave.
Dear Tech,
Interesting site!It seems to be a partner with Ancestry.Com which I already subscribe to.
I’ll play with this site and see what I might find out.
Roca
If you read Hale’s book on the Tutelo language, there’s talk about how surprised everyone was, when he published his findings, that there were Siouan people in the east, and he had a hard sell getting people to believe it. I’ve gotten the impression that the Siouan cultures were lost in the upper south without any whites ever even knowing that’s who they were.
Techteach,
🙂 Thank you for these links and the great topic. I can’t seem to get the links to work, but It’s obvious they do. So my computer is obviously considering taking a vacation! NOT, this will give me something else to do over the next few days, so it’s not allowed to vacate on me!
Linda, i’m very interested in the burial mounds, so thank you for this info. Lynella.
techteach wrote: Hey guys.
Thought you might find this an interesting URL:
It provides Thomas Jefferson’s notes on the tribes of Virginia. The entire web site deals with disappearing Indians : http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/lewisandclark/students/projects/monacans/index.html
Techteach
These are some good links…thanks Techteach, though it seems I’m 3 years late.
My David Erasmus Brown b. May 5, 1828 in Loudoun Co, VA doesn’t seem to appear on these records. I am under the impression that his Father was Isaac and Mother ukn. How does Loudoun Co enter into the picture for any of these peoples/families? David’s Father’s name and origin are unknown to me at this point, or at least not sure of.
Anyone with other info. David did marry a woman from Madison, Guernsey Co, OH of the last name Hixson. David had a daughter Euphemia Hester Brown who married my GGreatgrandpa Woolery.
Any ideas are welcome.
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