Welcome to my #IndigenousPeoplesDay and #GenealogyMonday thread on my 3x great-grandmother Adeline Goins: or, How I Was Always Told We Were Choctaw but We Are Actually Descended from Free People of Color! A disclaimer: I am white. I am a Cherokee citizen, but I am also white.

I benefit from my whiteness every day. I am also descended from Cherokees since time immemorial, from Cherokees who owned enslaved people, and from Free People of Color who owned enslaved people. I am descended from enslaved people who secured their own freedom, in the 17th cent.

I remember being as young as 8, and hearing my Cherokee grandma say, "We are more Choctaw than Cherokee, but we couldn't get on the Choctaw rolls." When I started researching my dad's tree in 2012, I didn't discover until 2016 the origins of this myth and some facts around it.

My last thread was about Jonathan Mulkey- first white Clerk of the Cherokee Council in 1843, married to Chief John Ross's youngest sister Maria. Their son Lewis married Adeline Goins in 1857 in San Saba county, Texas. Adeline's death certificate from 1926 lists her race as white.

When Lewis was interviewed by the Dawes Commission for his Cherokee citizenship (1901), he claimed Adeline was Choctaw, that she was on Choctaw rolls as Choctaw, but had never been admitted as a Choctaw citizen. There is no Choctaw census listing Adeline Goins.

Adeline's parents were Jeremiah Goins and Sharafina Drake, my 4x great-grandparents. Adeline had 12 siblings, and what I did find was an extended federal court case where Adeline's siblings were attempting to claim Choctaw citizenship. I've included the citation.

This is where I don't understand all the facts, bc I'm not a legal scholar. From what I understand, the Choctaw-Chickasaw Citizenship Court at first admitted a bunch of folks it shouldn't have, then a "test case" invalidated a whole bunch of those claims, including the Goins'.

I'd love to understand this more- if you can help me with that, please share resources! Anyways, Dawes said, you aren't Choctaw. So, grandma was right- we couldn't get on the rolls. But why was it so messy? All my Cherokee ancestors, Dawes rolls were very straight-forward.

Why weren't the Goins admitted as Choctaw citizens? One day I went back to ancestry and looked for more records on Sharafina Drake. Another ancestry user had uploaded a transcription of Sharafina's baptismal certificate- from St. Martinville, Louisiana, 1804.

On names in genealogical records: they change frequently. Sharafina is at times Seraphia or Charity. This church record has Spanish names and French names, which is about right for Attakapas region in 1804. So this document was the first time I learned Sharafina's parents' names.

This document led to others from the same church- the baptismal record for Sharafina's father, John Aaron Drake, Jr (listing his parents) and the marriage record for her parents, John and Rozalie Abshire. Finally- a bunch of names to plug into my tree. I started googling.

What I found next shocked me! Literally fell out of my chair! At first I had no idea what I was looking at. This is what I found. My ancestor's names, in this huge genealogical and historical work about Free People of Color (FPOC): http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/Chavis_family.htm

Charity Chavis, Adeline Goins' great-grandmother, was a "mulato libre," her father Richard a "free black" taxable as a white in Granville county, North Carolina in 1750. Also, it's pretty neat when you can see a name carried forward like that through the generations (Charity).

Turns out the Drake family and Goins family are also in this work, "Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia" by Paul Heinegg. This book received awards from the North Carolina Genealogical Society in 1992 and the American Society of Genealogists in 1994.

The Philip Goin/Goins/Gowens mentioned above is Jeremiah Goins father, Adeline's grandfather. On the 1810 census referenced above, his household also includes three enslaved people. Here's how this ties to Adeline, who, remember- claimed she was Choctaw (read the tree L to R).

When I first found this source, I didn't know what it was. Turns out the Foreword was written by Ira Berlin. And there are names from my tree in the Introduction. This work is *extensively* footnoted and the sources Heinegg used led me to other primary sources.

My ancestors were among a large cohort of FPOC who migrated to Louisiana, 1750-1780. I don't know why- I assume it had a reputation as a safe place for FPOC. I found this book of records that confirmed my FPOC ancestors owned enslaved people and sold property (88 & 2676).

So- all this to say, it's pretty clear who Adeline Goins' ancestors were. And there isn't a documented Choctaw among them, even though it was documented her father Jeremiah lived among the Choctaw and spoke Choctaw as a translator.

The 1901 Dawes interview with Adeline's husband, Lewis Mulkey, confirms he thought she was Choctaw. It's even printed in Oklahoma history books that she was Choctaw (bc of the Ross connection). Genealogy involves weighing evidence, searching for context clues, and corroboration.

Overwhelmingly, the evidence indicates Adeline's grandfathers (Philip Goins and John Aaron Drake, Jr) were FPOC, classified as "mulato libres," of "mixed" ancestry that certainly may at some point involved various native peoples. Why did they claim Choctaw over that?

Well, more context clues may tell the story: Jeremiah and Sharafina Drake left Louisiana for Texas by 1835. This area of southwest Louisiana, by 1835, was becoming the sugar plantation capital of the world, with some of the highest %s of enslaved people in the entire US.

Was it safer, once Jeremiah got to Texas, to claim he was Choctaw, even though he must've known his father and Sharafina's father both were FPOC? And look how tenacious that story was: my grandma told me they were Choctaw, in the 1990s.

This story leaves me with so many questions. Is this a common origin of all the "my grandma says we were native" stories that every Okie grows up surrounded by? Or is this rare? Why did so many FPOC move to Louisiana in the 18th c? What were their lives like?

Adeline Goins' story is about whiteness being constructed over time, how native identity has historically been entangled with anti-blackness, and how people moved fluidly between what we think were strict racial boxes. This is Adeline, with her husband Lewis, and their family.

Thanks for reading my #genealogy thread. I wish I'd learned all this in time to share it with my grandma. Sometimes it takes decades to find answers and I think my work is a living testament to all my ancestors endured. I feel closer to them for knowing the truth.