I’ve been dabbling in genealogy for several years now. Thanks to my cousins Mary Hart & her sister Virginia, our mothers’ families were traced all the way back to the 15th and 16th centuries. I have found a lot on my dad’s ancestry, and lately I traced my ex-husband’s family lines for my sons. You find out all kinds of interesting, fascinating, sometimes scandalous or even ghastly things when you get into this pursuit of your roots. Family legends and stories that the old folks swear is true often turn out not to be. For example, my great grandmother Nancy Frances Dotson was supposedly full-blood Choctaw (she does have some Indian blood, but maybe no more than half). Her father was a medicine man, according to my uncle who loved to spin a good yarn. Around 1880, according to Uncle G., the family set out from Fort Smith to north Texas to find special medicinal plants. Because there was still some trouble with Indians crossing the border and causing trouble, the local settlers starting firing on the family. Nancy was 8, her brother a couple of years older. Their father, whose name remains unknown, told the kids to run for the river (the Red) and go back to their home. Nancy instead hid in some bushes. The brother may have made it across, the rest of the family was killed. Kindly settlers, the McClanahans, found little Nancy and took her in. When she was 13 or 14 she married Tom Ward, a cousin of the McC’s. All this is according to Uncle G. The family settled in Hopkins County, where my grandmother was born in 1893. When the kids started school, they were taunted as being “half-breeds,” and the Wards moved to central Texas and told the kids not to mention their Indian blood. Hoyt Axton wrote a song about that time in our history … At some point after the 1905 Dawes Act, which divided up the communal land and gave each Indian family their own land, the better for the round eyes to buy it from them, oil was discovered. The story goes on that our family could have had some of that land, but the red-haired papa Tom Ward refused to go “live with those dang Indians!”
The real story, as I found out, was far less colorful, but maybe even sadder. Nancy was born in Indian Territory. Her mother, name unknown, but she “may have been a Weathers,” according to one of Nancy’s sons, may have died at Nancy’s birth. Her father, who was apparently full-blood Choctaw, put her in an orphanage. At age 8, she was taken in by the McC’s as a maid, and married off to the much older Tom Ward. She resented her father for not keeping her. He came to visit her after she was married, she served him tea, walked out the back door and waited until he left. She never saw him again. I have learned her anger may have been misplaced. At the time, the government was forcing the Indians to put their kids in boarding schools, where all their Indianness was beaten out of them. That’s likely what happened. The oil story was pretty close to the truth. One of Nancy’s daughters filed suit in the 1940’s for a share of the land, and was told that her mother had “slept through her rights” by not going to live there, and the family was out of luck. Here’s a picture of my grandmother, Mary Sabina Ward Hornsby, and her kids ca. 1926. Her husband and oldest son drowned in 1922, and she had a rough time of it. My dad is the little dark-haired boy with the puppy. His hair was, until very recently, jet black.
