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I have seen many places in reference to William Collins who was born
around 1665 in Nansemond County, Va.
However, there is one place that actually refers to him as “Chief Mahenip Of The Saponi Indian Tribe”:
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=reneejones&id=I3417
How can this be when it seems his father was from england? I have searched the web and have found no other reference to him being a Chief. Has anybody else ran across this?
thanks,
jay
I have no clue on this one. There’s a William Collins of Nansemond County in my own line (James and William were used in every generation and it’s hard to distinguish them in the land records), but while later on there were some intermarriages by some collateral lines with the Nansemonds, the Nansemonds spoke Algonquian, not Siouxan, so I don’t know why they’d be called Saponi. This is a mystery to me and if the William who died in Chowan County really came from Nansemond (another thing I’d like to see documented), I don’t know what the reference is based on. I know some of the Collinses of Bertie County NC had roots in Nansemond among my Collinses, and so did the Bertie/Franklin County Collinses, and they lived close to the Haliwa Saponi. But this is all new to me, and I thought I’d been through the Nansemond/Isle of Wight records pretty thoroughly. Let me know if you learn more.
Michael Dunn
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