Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Finding your Roots

 


Finding your Roots

 Genealogy is one of my hobbies that I inherited from my mother.  I wish I had inherited her buxom body, blond German hair and flair for cooking, but I got this instead.  I tend to look more like my dad’s side of the family.  But my mother loved genealogy.  She had huge family charts in the dining room that I now have.  At each family reunion, she went armed with a notebook and would record each new child and seek out the elders for more information about her ancestors. 

I joined Ancestry.com in 2010; over a decade ago.  It took me a few years to learn it, but now with that tool and Newspapers.com – I have discovered my “roots.”  One of the things that always puzzled me was my Native American; Cherokee heritage. My Grandma Mabel Phillips Cook ended up dying on the Cherokee Nation reservation in Oklahoma.  It is difficult to determine my exact Cherokee blood percentage because we have Native Americans on both sides of my father’s family.  Some of our ancestors were adopted; but the Cherokee nation treats them as tribe members.

I have been writing most of my life; first screenplays and now fantasy fiction for the Middle Grade audience.  My latest work, Sleep Warrior is about a young Cherokee Princess, Clarissa who takes over the body of her great, great, great, great, great granddaughter and becomes a superhero.  It is roughly based on Clarissa Wright – my actual 4 times great grandmother and the grandmother of Moses Phillips.  William Phillips – Grandma Rees’ first husband (my father’s grandfather) died tragically in Orange, CA in 1944 in a car accident.  William’s father was Moses Phillips and the person who did the most work registering all our ancestors (like my Grandmother Mabel Phillips Cook) into the Cherokee Nation.  

Moses was born in 1852 in Going Snake District in the Indian Territory.   His family is from South Carolina, North Carolina and TN – two areas where the Cherokee were removed, along with Georgia, after gold was discovered.  Moses’ grandfather, Elijah Phillips was born in 1805 in South Carolina and his wife Clarissa Wright was from Cherokee, TN (now Cherokee, NC) and part of the Wolf Clan.  She died in 1836. This is an important date, since she was only 33 years old at the time. Between 1836 and 1839 of an estimated 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation were removed from their lands in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama to the Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma.)  This Cherokee removal, part of the Trail of Tears, refers to the forced relocation where the tribes were marched on foot from the east to Oklahoma without adequate food, water, or protection from the heat and cold. The resultant deaths along the way and at the end of the movement of an estimated 4,000 Cherokee.  We don’t know where Moses’ father, John Phillips was born since the records during this period are sparse and he died young at 35. 

Frustrated in not being able to learn more about Clarissa and her son who was only 12 when she died, I decided to make it up; thus the start of my fiction book, Sleep Warrior.

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