Home -- Links -- Lessons -- Resources -- E-mail
Degree of Blood It is very important to note that the degree of blood that your ancestor may have registered under is not always their true degree of blood. There are many contributing factors to what the degree of blood was recorded as, for instance:
The government required that if your ancestor was ½ Cherokee they were not legal able to transact any business without a white guardian appointed over them. Because of this fact a large number of full bloods and those that were ½ Cherokee enrolled as less then half. Another one you will come across is that they are registered as full bloods and you KNOW that they have a white ancestor. In most cases, those who were actually ¾ or more were often classified as full bloods.
Another factor is in some cases they did not actually know their degree of blood. If you have looked on the microfilm or received copies of the Dawes enrollment packet you will have probably come across "I guess I am about ¼ Cherokee " or similar remarks in there. Amazingly, this was what the Dawes Commission would use as a basis for Degree of Blood.
The last factor is that there were different people calculating the degrees of Blood sometimes not very accurately. It is not unusual to find 1 brother listed as 3/32 and the rest of his siblings listed as 1/16 etc.
Very often I have seen a lot of you throw out very valuable information because the blood degree doesn't match. If you have any suspicions at all GET THE CENSUS CARD, which we'll discuss in a later lesson.
More Native America Research Lessons
©1999 -- [email protected] -- all rights reserved.
