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Vance sent me a school picture that had his great uncles’ photos in it.
This is what he wrote about them:
The one [on the left] was called “Otho” Richey, dad always called him “O’thur,” Uncle O’thur.
The other Richey was “Hoten” Richey. . .
Both were born in the Chicasaw Nation in the 1890’s near Loco in what is now Stephens county, the southern part. Back then it was called Pickens County or district.
They are grandma’s youngest brothers.
Please know their father was Jeffry Hoten Richey, b. Powhatan AR. Jeffery’s father was Joseph E. Richey, b. Gibson county, Indiana, 1819. Joseph’s dad was John Richey, b. 1797, VA.
[This message has been edited by Linda (edited 12-02-2002).]
[This message has been edited by Linda (edited 12-02-2002).]
Thanks Linda for puttin’ them up. You did an excelent job of scanning and blowing them up! Wa-Do! They are grandma’s youngest brothers. Othur (spelled phonetically as it was pronounced to me) died a very young man, about 1918 or so. There was a big flu epidemic near the end of WW1 and he somehow cought it and died. I probably met Uncle Hoten at Richey family reunions (they were held at Lake Quanah Parker in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife refuge) as a child, as I met many relations at those events. I fondly recall wakin’ up in the mornin’ in the tent lookin out and bein’ surrounded by a herd of bison, and mom freakin’out sayin to the kids to stay in the tent until they passed through. ha ha. But honestly I have no recollection of meeting Uncle Hoten. He, like his older sister, my grandma, died in the 1960s.
Those photos were taken during the 1909-1910 school year. They ewre taken from a book “History of Tillman County, vol. 2”. That’s a county in SW Ok.
vance hawkins
[This message has been edited by vance hawkins (edited 12-02-2002).]
[This message has been edited by vance hawkins (edited 12-02-2002).]
[This message has been edited by vance hawkins (edited 12-02-2002).]
I enjoyed working on those photos. Got a sense of those boys fitting into that school. I was in junior high starting in the mid sixties, and I know kids who looked like that would have been on the edge of the class. It’s painful remembering how class-ridden, or race-ridden our school was.
well i’m honored you asked for the photo and and took the time to work on them. thanks.
Also remember the early “westerns”, movies, where them made Indian people look savage and ignorant. Movies just echoed stereotypes already in the minds of the public.
On all census records you’ll find my “Richey” ancestors saying they are “Caucasian” — so it is good to see the photographs. Sayin’ “Causasian” on a census record isn’t proof, the photos are proof, tho, what a person looks like. I think because of a stigma or bein’ around people who talk of it, well it might have made those generations try to deny their heritage. we don’t know what they went through unless we take a walk in their shoes, really.
vance
Who knows if they were even asked. From the tidbits I’ve come across, there was a pretty wide latitude about who was tallied as white, (just so long as you weren’t perceptibly black. That’s another matter.)
It’s like the Ohio case where the guy pleaded illegal arrest because he claimed the sheriff ‘weren’t no white man. His grandma’s an Indian, everybody back east in NC knows it.’ So the judge told him ‘Tough, so was mine. White or no, you still gotta do what we say.’ Something like that.
Nineteenth century culture along the ‘frontier’ had a very blind eye, I think, when it came to Indian blood. It’s like my friend, John Poundstone, wrote me. He travels to Africa a lot, knows a lot of Africans and they see a difference between the way Americans and Europeans look. They can see how Indian Americans look. We don’t see it, we’re blind to it.
Anyway, my point is, if you moved into town and they let you enroll your kids in school, you aren’t exactly going to bust in and say, ‘Hey, how come you let my kids in here, we’re Indian?’
We shouldn’t feel like we need to apologize for them behaving that way. I’ve never seen any documentation that Indians whose tribes had somehow managed to remain intact, struggling to survive on reservations, were running around recruiting more Indians to come stay with them. A whole LOT of people were displaced. Come 1830 there was no place else to go but far enough west till people stopped asking questions.
dates. Hoten & Other were born in the 1890s in the Chickasaw Nation of South Central Oklahoma. Grandma (Loney Richey Hawkins, 1883-1963) was their older sister.
Their father was Jeffery Hoten Richey, b. 1851 Powhatan, Lawrence County, Ar-d. 1926 Tillman County Ok. Their mother was Josephine Brown, descended from Brown, Guess & Looney families of Chickamaugan Cherokee heritage. Since this is Saponi site, i’ll talk about the Richey’s here.
Jeff’s parents were Joseph E. Richey and Sarah Wayland Richey. Waylands first appear in Arkansas 1815 from Va & SC before that. One of Sarah’s sisters married a Griffith surnamed man, and they hade 2 kids that appear on the Swetland Rolls of 1869 with a family of Brown’s/Raper’s. A Powell Brown is probably the father of the “Brown” male from this family, and Powell appears in Ga 1830, 1840 Jackson Co Al in 1850, and Lawrence Co, Ar 1860. Might be wrong about 1840 as I forgot, but the rest are right.
Joseph E. Richey was born in 1819 in Gibson Co, In. His father (John Richey, 1797 Va — 1861 Lawrence Co., Ar.) came to Gibson Co. In. sometime between 1797 and 1817 when he is recorded as marrying Mary (Polly) Wood (1796 Tn — d. ? Ar.)
Mary’s parents were, I ma pretty sure Joseph Wood (1745- ?) and Nancy Dickson (1785- ? )listed as a “Pioneer of Indiana”. Joseph might have been her husbands father, tho. I need to work on this as I think more info on these people exists. I was told the Dixon and Wood surname was found amongst the Saponi, and that the Saponi name was probably synonimous with Blackfoot. There sure are a lot of folks from Appalacia (sp?) who have the tradition of bein’ Blackfoot Indian. Also the term “Tuckahoe” has popped up from this region also. I’ve come across “Richeys” with both these traditions, but noone that I’ve yet come across knows anything about its origin. I’m learnin’.
Next to Gibson County is Pike County, and there is a “Blackfoot Church” dating to the end of the 18th century, and my ancestors appear here at least by the beginning of the 19th. It says it was named “Blackfoot” because of Indians called “Blackfoot” living nearby.
John Richey was born from census records in Virginna, where we don’t know. But someone here at this website found a “free man of color” named Solomon Richey in Amherst County, Va in 1810.
None of this constitutes proof Saponi heritage, but the photos are proof of Indian heritage, and the dates, locations, et cetera, are evidence. My Indiana ancestors were mixed blood Indian. They lived close to where the Blackfoot Church in Indiana was where it says Blackfoot Indians lived. They were in Va before that, which is where the Blackfoot were said to have originated.
So Linda, I am thinkin’ more and more that the “Saponi” are where my Virginia Indians came from, not Pamunkey or any of the other Va tribes — the Indiana church called “Blackfoot” sort of put it over the top for me. But as I said this isn’t proof, but it sure is evidence I didn’t have a few months ago.
thanks everyone
vance hawkins
[This message has been edited by vance hawkins (edited 12-10-2002).]
I think your Hoten and my Francis look a lot alike. Francis said his family was from Virginia, and his daughter said we are Blackfoot.
Dear Vance,
Your ancestor O’thur, made me think of my ancestor’s that have the surname of Arthur. They were from Appomattox, Virginia. The Arthur’s are direct ancestors of mine. Also we have a Powhatan Cash in our family, not a direct ancestor but is a brother of a direct ancestor. The Wood/Woods family still live in Nelson county, Va., they married into my Turner line. The Brown’s married into my Cash line.
Sincerely,
Coheelady
Hi Linda
What court case are you referring to in Ohio? I’m not familiar with this one. Most of the ones I have come across deal with voting rights or school attendance. I’d be interested in finding out more about it.
Cohee Lady,
Sorry, but I don’t know anything about the Arthur surname. My Wood/s ancestors went to Indiana about 1800 also, same time my Richey’s did.
We have a link to more than one “Brown” ancestor, one directly and the one mentioned (Powell) seems to have been close to my Richey/Wayland ancestors, whereas another we know was Cherokee and married into that Richey family. We don’t know if or how Powell and David Brown were related. David is a great-great-grandfather of mine with known Cherokee roots.
vance
[This message has been edited by vance hawkins (edited 12-11-2002).]
Linda,
Well, Francis does look like he could be mixed blood.
Didn’t you say you had relatives/ancestors in that same area of S. Indiana or S. Illinois? Was that Francis and his relatives?
Also isn’t there mention somewhere on your website something about the “Person County, Indiana, Saponi”? Where is Person County? I looked for it and can’t find it on a map.
thanks
vance
Francis was born in Wabash County, IL in 1855. His father’s family had just moved there a few years earlier after a stay somewhere in OH for a decade or two. His father was born in PA. His mother, Eleanor Ulm was born in Wabash, IL in 1832. The family had just moved there from Sullivan, IN.
Forest, I saw a copy of that newspaper article in one of Richard Haithcock’s books. I know I’ve typed it out verbatim somewhere. I’m sure it’s in one of Richard’s books, but it’s not in the index. I’ll have to scan through the 19th century pages to find it. I’m sure it was about a defendant claiming he was not arrested legally because he said the person who arrested him was not white, but mixed Indian blooded. The judge either said it was he himself, or somebody else working in the court, who was mixed blooded too. I’m pretty sure it was Ohio. Definitely the Midwest.
Okay, so Francis’s IN-LAWS were living in that area since about 1823. Sullivan County IN, is right on the Illinois border, a county up and over from Wabash County. Wabash County is about 40 miles from that Blackfoot church. Sullivan county is about 50 miles from it. I’m trying to sort out what John and Bess have been saying about that.
The weird thing is, there are “Blackfoot sitings” or long standing traditions of native blood, on all four of my maternal grandmother’s lines. I was going to say, I just saw on a distant cousin’s website that they’ve always said Elizabeth Pontius had Indian blood. Our respective families have been separated for 150 years I imagine.
But that’s from a whole other line, not related to these Sullivan, Indiana people. They were Ulm/Smiths out of WV and Ohio.
Well, this is interesting. John Poundstone wrote, in the “Other Blackfoot” Prophetstown thread,
This area in what is now SW Indiana and SE/Central Illinois was not opened to white settlement until 1830.
That’s something to look into — is there something unusual about my Ulm/Smiths being there in 1823?
[This message has been edited by Linda (edited 12-11-2002).]
The Person County Indians are in Granville Co., NC. (They’re primarily Saponi.) I may have mentioned them becanse a group of Indian descended tri-racial people moved from there in the 1850’s to the county in WI where my family was. Some of my cousins are their cousins. My cousin, Jim Morley, has an incredible ged.com. His cousins are Revels out of Robeson county, and he’s got an obvious native line of Powell, West, Allen coming out of central VA.
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