Hello and Welcome,
My name is Darren McCathern. I am a member of the Advisory Board of the World GenWeb and of mixed blood Scottish & American Indian ancestry.
If you are interested in learning more about Celtic ancestry, please be sure to visit Scotland Royalty.
The area of my birthplace and residence is located near Amarillo Texas where I publish a syndicated global resource called Eagle World News.
My family is involved in the Equine Business, and I currently serve as Vice President of Wild Horse Advertising.
My Great-Great Grandmother Rebecca Jane McGhee was a Muscogee Indian from Alabama who married my GG Grandfather in East Texas who himself was of mixed blood Cherokee Ancestry. Little is known about my Grandmother, except for the fact that she was born around the year of 1845 and sometimes is found in records under the name "Nancy."
Currently I am the host of several project websites including the Kiowa Comanche Apache Reservation & my pages on the Cherokee Indians where I also have maps of villages located in Arkansas Territory prior to statehood.
There are several resources that I publish as a way to assist you in your search that may be of use, one is a lookups page for Cherokee Rolls, and there is also some very excellent Free Charts and family interview worksheets provided to help keep you organized.
If you have Free Vital Records available to share, or perhaps other information about the tribe, please consider contributing your information to our Archives as a way to help others in their own research.
If you are interested in exploring other cultures, please be sure to check out the Israel GenWeb.
If you have a webpage with information about the Muskogee People, then please submit your links to be included on this website for others to enjoy.
1889 — a federal court was established at Muskogee. Marriage
records of many white settlers will be found in its records from 1890 to 1907 (statehood).
1890 — a federal court was established at Ardmore
These were later divided into four
districts with 26 substations. They are:
Northern District, established in 1895, covered the area of the Cherokee and the Quapaw Agency, with Vinita as the court seat.
Central District, established in 1895, covered the area with Muskogee as the court seat.
Southern District, established in 1895, covered the area of the Choctaw and Chickasaw , with South McAlester (now called McAlester) as the court seat.
Western District, established in 1897, covered the area of the Chickasaw, with Ardmore as the court seat.
From about 1890 until Oklahoma statehood in November of 1907, marriages of
white and black citizens in the area were recorded in the various recording
districts of the U.S. federal court. Most of these records have been transcribed and are
on file at the Oklahoma Historical Society and the Family History Library. Muscogee County has marriage
records from July 1890.
Marriage records (if either the bride
or bridegroom was a citizen) prior to 1890 will be found in the tribe's
records. They are scattered and no known index exists to them. They can be found in
the respective tribal records at the Oklahoma Historical Society and many of
these have been filmed and are accessible through the Family History Library
system.
A white man who married a Native woman became an adopted member
of the tribe and was listed as an intermarried citizen. The number of intermarried
citizens increased so rapidly that strict laws were enacted regarding these marriages. The
cost of a license was expensive — at one time it amounted to $100 in the Choctaw Tribe.
Among the Cherokees, a man had to get 10 citizens to vouch for his good
character. A white man coming into the area to work was required to take out a
license or permit, and its cost varied according to the business. Ordinary laborers paid
only a small fee, while peddlers, mechanics and professional men had to pay much more. All
the tribes passed laws forbidding the leasing of land to white men, but in all of
them the laws were broken. A tribal citizen could employ a white man as a laborer to work
on a farm and could make a contract that the white man would have a share of the crops
instead of a wage in money.
A little history about the people . . .
The people of Muskhogean linguistic stock, had adopted
fragment groups into the tribe since early times. The tribe in Oklahoma contained
people from the Koasati, Hitchiti, Natchez, Apalachicola, Alabama, Tuskegee and Yuchi
(Euchee) tribes. All of these, with the exception of the Yuchis, belonged to the
Muskhogean language group.
The people had begun arriving in the region since the early 1830's, mostly from
Alabama.
The 1867 constitution divided the tribe into six districts — Okmulgee,
Coweta, Muskogee, Deep Fork, Eufaula and Wewoka. Its Council elected a judge for
each district, the principal chief appointed six district attorneys with the approval of
the council, and the voters of each district elected a captain and four privates to serve
as a light-horse police force. Trial by jury was provided for civil and criminal cases.
All suits at law in which the amount in dispute was more than $100 were tried by the
Supreme Court, composed of five justices named by the Council for terms of four
years.
The earliest settlements in what is
now Oklahoma had been determined by the Texas Road and fertile land that attracted wild
game and farmers to the Three Forks area (near what is now Muskogee) and the forks of the
Canadian River (near what is now Eufaula). At the forks of the Canadian River, Asbury
Mission had been established in 1847 and several towns grew up and flourished in that
vicinity. North Fork Town grew and was important until the Missouri, Kansas and Texas
Railroad was built through the area in 1871. After a station was built at Eufaula, the
older towns moved to the railroad. The towns of North Fork Town and Micco Post Office
vanished, while Eufaula grew. The St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad (a successor of the
Atlantic and Pacific) extended its line to Tulsa in 1882 and to Sapulpa in 1886. The
Arkansas Valley Railroad crossed the Missouri, Kansas and Texas at Wagoner.
From the close of the Civil War in 1865 to the admission of
Oklahoma to the Union as a state in 1907, the history of the eastern half of the
present-state of Oklahoma is quite different from that of the western half. When the
people of the Five Civilized Tribes ceded their western lands as a home for friendly allies of the Plains, they really
divided Oklahoma into two nearly equal parts.
After 1890, the western portion became known as Oklahoma Territory
and the eastern part was called Indian Territory. These Twin Territories, as they came to
be known, were nearly the same size, but were quite unlike geographically and politically.
The citizens of the Five Civilized Tribes did not pay taxes in the ordinary sense of the
word. Money to support the government and tribal schools came from annuities, from the
license fees, coal royalties from the Outlet lands in the case of the Cherokees, and from
some other sources.
The number of whites in this area steadily increased. In
1880 it was estimated that there were 6,000 whites in the area of the Five Civilized
Tribes, not including railway workers and certain other laborers, whom the tribal officers
had allowed to remain. The U.S. government tried to remove those who had no permits, but
they usually came back again. By 1884, the number of whites in this area was estimated at
25,000. In 1890, between 120,000 and 140,000. As new railroads were built into the region more whites arrived. By 1895, the whites were estimated at 300,000 and by the
census of 1900 there was a population of whites of nearly 400,000 and only 70,000 Natives.
