Indian Connections
[Note, that I will sometimes be using the term “Indian”
in this paper rather than the current politically correct term of “Native
American”. This is because I will be referring to a number of historical
records where Indian was the term in use at the time.]
My wife and I became engaged in August 1970. At the time we
were each the first in our respective families to do so. However, before we
married in July 1971, there were other weddings in both our families – my sister
Beth married Gerald Meskun on 10/24/1970, and Donna’s brother Charles married
Sarah King on 5/29/1971. I was still in graduate school in Michigan in the fall
of 1970 and so was not able to attend my sister’s wedding, but both Donna and I
attended her brother’s wedding which was only 7 weeks before our own.
Sarah was a member of the Odawa tribe in northern Michigan.
She had a son, Martin (Marty), from a previous relationship. Charles adopted
Marty, giving him the new last name of VanDeCar. And she and Charles had two
daughters in the next few years (1972 and 1974).
For the last fifty years, I have thought that Sarah (and
Marty) were full-blooded Odawa. But I was recently doing some genealogical
research in that part of my family tree and thought I would see what I could
find regarding Sarah’s ancestry. This has led to some interesting discoveries
which I will document here.
The Flinn Connection
My sister-in-law Sarah went to college and got her training as
a nurse. Since she lived in Michigan and my wife and I lived first in
Connecticut and then in Pennsylvania our interactions were limited to times
that we went to Michigan to visit family and friends. She was a very loving and
gracious person and we continued seeing her from time to time, even after she
and Charles divorced. She passed away from liver cancer in 2013 and we all mourned
her passing.
Tribal records are not available digitally in ancestry.com
like records from European immigrants. So, I was not surprise that there were
no hints available before the mid-1800s as I built out Sarah’s ancestral tree
as Michigan only became a state in 1837. The few family names in Sarah’s tree
were decidedly Odawa names such as Naganashe, Kenoshmeg, and Kosequat. Thus, I
was surprised to see a “shaky leaf” hint pop up with the name Maria Flinn, a variant
spelling of a decidedly European name, Flynn. What was going on?
Rather than blindly accept the suggestion from ancestry.com,
I decided to look at any available documents that might reference this
unexpected connection. There were two obvious ones – both on documents
regarding the children of Maria and her husband, Joseph Kosequat.
The first was a death certificate for one of Maria and Joseph’s
children, Lucy. In it were listed Lucy’s parents and birthplaces. The name of
Lucy’s mother was clearly listed as Maria Flynn.
[Lucy death certificate]
The second was a record of the marriage of Peter Kosequat
where his father was recorded as “Joe” and his mother as “Mary Ann Flinn”.
[Peter marriage record]
The minor misspellings of “Flynn” for “Flinn” and “Mary Ann”
for “Maria” aside, having two such references to the name of Sarah’s
great-grandmother being Maria Flinn was pretty convincing to me and I entered
Maria into the family tree.
Was Maria an Indian?
Having confirmed that Maria Flinn was her maiden name, now
the question is whether the name Flinn was truly European as I thought, or
whether she was an Indian and the name was only coincidental. Maria was born in
1840 in Mullet Lake which is in the current Cheboygan county. In order to
answer this question, let’s look at various documents for Maria as well as her
parents and siblings.
I first looked at the 1850 census where Maria was listed
with her parents and family. This confirmed her family, but there is no
indication of race in the 1850 census. Beginning in 1860, the federal census
forms recorded the race of each individual. Maria consistently listed herself,
along with her husband and children, as “Ind” (Indian). But is that merely how
she “identified”?
[William census 1850]
[Maria census 1860]
[Maria census 1870]
But in the 1860 census her father, William, was listed as
white, her mother Harriett as Indian, and her siblings as “M” (Mulatto or
mixed). This is the more accurate listing.
[William census 1860]
In later years, Maria’s brother Samuel was listed as “White”
on his death certificate (although this was a reference to “color” and not “race”.
[Samuel death certificate]
And when Maria’s mother Harriett died, she was listed as “colored”
and Harriett’s father was listed as being Indian, and specifically Chippewa.
[Harriett death certificate]
Thus, it is pretty clear that while Maria identified as
being Indian, she was genetically mulatto with a Chippewa mother and a European
father. But she then married into the Odawa tribe and lived her entire life in
the Cheboygan area.
Tracing the Flinn family
Maria’s father, and Sarah’s great-great-grandfather, William
Walter Flinn (1809-1863), had been born in New Hampshire. He came to the Midwest,
probably sometime in the 1830s, married a Chippewa maiden, Harriett, and
started a family with their second child being Maria. While records in New Hampshire
are not as extensive as those found in the other New England states like
Massachusetts and Connecticut, there are still a lot of records available.
Thus, it was fairly easy to trace his family tree. Some branches were in
Hillsborough county, New Hampshire, but others were in Essex county,
Massachusetts, perhaps 25-30 miles to the southeast.
With over 150 years from William’s birth in 1809 back to
some of the original settlers of Essex county during the Great Migration years
of 1620-1640, there were six or seven generations to explore. Most of those family
lines were well documented, but I was also looking specifically to see if there
were any overlaps between William’s ancestors and the ancestors of either
myself or my wife. So, it took many hours of going through the many branches of
William’s ancestral tree, all the while checking for consistency and also
continually cross checking for any which overlapped existing branches that I
had already documented in my or my wife’s family tree.
There were lots of different family names in William’s
ancestral tree – names like Pearson, Wilson, Boardman, Gould, and Dodson. I
have not yet finished building out a complete family tree back to the list of
original immigrants. However, I have thus far uncovered one ancestor who also
appears in my wife’s lineage – William Towne (1598-1673). He is Sarah’s great*9
grandfather as well as the great*10 grandfather of my wife and her brother
Charles.
Thus, in 1971 when Charles (with a decidedly Dutch last name
of VanDeCar and who had no idea that his ancestral line included many links
back to the English of colonial New England), married Sarah (who believed that
she was 100% Native American), who would have suspected that he was marrying
his 10th cousin, once removed? Certainly I didn’t until I ran across
this “misplaced” surname of Flinn among Sarah’s ancestors. Sarah may only have
been 1/16th English, but it is certainly more than I expected.
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