Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Oklahoma: Two Genealogists and a DNA Match (with Nicka Sewell-Smith) | Episode 73

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Oklahoma: Two Genealogists and a DNA Match (with Nicka Sewell-Smith) | Episode 73 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You know anybody who's doing genealogy and is like, really into it.
• 0:03
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: We love puzzles, we love trying to figure things out, and some of the puzzles are more longstanding and take years to figure out.
• 0:12
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Some of them.
• 0:13
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You get answers immediately.
• 0:14
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So that's just the give or take of this.
• 0:17
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You know, and whatever you pour into it, you're going to get it back at some point.
• 0:21
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You just don't know when you are.
• 0:24
  Crista Cowan: Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future.
• 0:37
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:38
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America Tales of immigration, migration, courage and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:55
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover, from Sea to Shining Sea, the stories that live in us.
• 1:02
  Crista Cowan: We are five episodes into our America 250 series, which means it is time for the state of Oklahoma Now.
• 1:14
  Crista Cowan: I have a lot of family ties to the state of Oklahoma, but so does one of my cousins.
• 1:21
  Crista Cowan: She is a three-peat here on the podcast, but when I think about Oklahoma, I think about Nicka Sewell-Smith.
• 1:30
  Crista Cowan: Now, if you listen to episode 34, you know she tells the story of her connection to the Cherokee Nation, but today she's going to learn about some other connections she has to the state of Oklahoma.
• 1:44
  Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with Nika Sewell-Smith.
• 1:47
  Crista Cowan: Well, I'm so glad you're back.
• 1:49
  Crista Cowan: Three.
• 1:50
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Pete, listen, we're like the Lakers here.
• 1:52
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I love it.
• 1:53
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I love it.
• 1:54
  Crista Cowan: Okay, well, today's story is personal for both of us.
• 1:56
  Crista Cowan: I'm really excited to share this.
• 1:58
  Crista Cowan: But before we dive into that, you talk a lot about the Rogers family when you speak and teach and in the research that you do, and this is a story tangentially connected to that.
• 2:10
  Crista Cowan: So, on your dad's mother's side of the family tree, the Rogers are her father's side, correct, correct, okay?
• 2:18
  Crista Cowan: But you don't talk a lot about her mother, your grandmother's mother.
• 2:22
  Crista Cowan: So you knew your grandmother, yes, yes, and did she tell you stories about her mom?
• 2:28
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You know what?
• 2:28
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It's interesting because my dad's mom, she was almost like an orphan a little bit.
• 2:35
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So by the time my father was born, both of my grandmother's parents had died and my grandmother had my dad at 18.
• 2:42
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So she was super young.
• 2:44
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So like any stories that we have about either of my great grandparents, they're coming kind of like you know, like a long time ago.
• 2:52
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I mean, you have to remember, my grandmother was born in 1919.
• 2:54
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So this meant both of her parents were they were dead before the 1940, like they were gone and in essence my grandmother's oldest sister really kind of stepped up as like a matriarch in the family and she was the one that was like the keeper of the family history, like that was like her thing.
• 3:10
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And so stories I have.
• 3:14
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I actually have a recipe from my great grandmother that was in the Los Angeles Times, actually found it on newspaperscom and it was for bread pudding and my grandmother had submitted it for this recipe contest and was talking about how her mother made it.
• 3:29
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So it was one of those things that like got passed down through the generations and so me and my niece are supposed to make it.
• 3:35
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: We haven't made it yet, but I remember finding that going.
• 3:38
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Wow, like this is a piece of my grandmother's mom that I that I didn't know that she retained after all that time, my grandmother's mom that I didn't know that she retained after all that time.
• 3:46
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So I have pictures of her.
• 3:46
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It's really strange.
• 3:47
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: A lot of us look like her and we look like her mom.
• 3:51
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But you know the scowl.
• 3:53
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: There's a scowl we all kind of have totally get it from her.
• 3:57
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But she was a super interesting person.
• 3:59
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I mean you know you have her husband being the one who got citizenship in the Cherokee Nation and getting a land allotment and that's how you know, me and my family derive our citizenship.
• 4:10
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But she got rejected and her mother got rejected, even though her mother and her grandparents were Cherokee Freedmen.
• 4:17
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: They were enslaved by people in the Cherokee Nation.
• 4:19
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: All these people had Dawes applications.
• 4:22
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But you know, a lot of times when people read those they get discouraged if a family member gets rejected, not realizing that's a ton of paper.
• 4:30
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So when I'm looking through my great grandmother's Dawes application, I have interviews with her mother where they're asking her questions directly about her life.
• 4:38
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I have a birth record for my great grandmother, who was born in the 1870s, for my great-grandmother who's born in the 1870s.
• 4:47
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I have accounts from relatives and neighbors and all this kind of incredible firsthand accounts that I don't have like on other branches of my family.
• 4:53
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I get this on this particular site.
• 4:55
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So I often, especially when I read through the Dawes application of my great-great-grandmother for my great-grandmother, I often just kind of visualize like them sitting and being, you know, interviewed by the Dawes Commission, and the fact that I have pictures of both of them, so I can kind of visually see them, you know, see them talking and answering all the questions which were kind of a little bit ridiculous.
• 5:21
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 5:21
  Crista Cowan: Well, I have your family tree here, because I wanted to make sure I got information correct.
• 5:26
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Right, we are here for the accuracy.
• 5:28
  Crista Cowan: So your paternal grandmother's mom's name was Clara Bonetta Allen, and is that like what?
• 5:35
  Crista Cowan: When they refer to her, what did they call her?
• 5:37
  Crista Cowan: Grandma Clara.
• 5:37
  Crista Cowan: Okay, and then her mother was Sarah Bean, and you have all this information that you have inherited and discovered about these two women, but what did you know about Grandma Clara's father?
• 5:52
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So this part of the story.
• 5:54
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: This is why I talked about the cockamamie questions in the Dawes application.
• 5:58
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So Dawes' process was pretty much like three parts.
• 6:02
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You had a card that would have information like name, age, gender, whether the person was on a previous Cherokee role, if they were enslaved, who their slaveholder was, and then for freedmen they would record the name, district and slaveholder of the parent of the person who was applying.
• 6:20
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So let's say you had three generations on a card.
• 6:23
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You had information for a lot of people.
• 6:25
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So I pulled my great grandmother's card and I start going through the application and she didn't get to the land allotment stage, which is the third stage.
• 6:33
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It stopped at the application because she got rejected.
• 6:35
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But they were asking her mom all these cockamamie questions like was he white?
• 6:41
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And I was like what?
• 6:43
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And they're like, well, you guys were married.
• 6:46
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And I'm like why are they?
• 6:49
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like this is about whether or not they were turned back to the Indian territory in time enough for them to qualify for citizenship.
• 6:55
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Why are we having this whole conversation around, like whether or not she was with a white man and had a child by a white man?
• 7:01
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So like we knew in my family that my, that my great-grandmother's father was supposed to be white.
• 7:05
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: No one well, actually I can't say no one knew his name because Aunt Edna, my grandmother's oldest sister, who was the matriarch that I just talked about, she wrote this like hilarious, like four page account of the family history where she was like tongue in cheek, like mocking people going to the library to go and research their family history after Roots came out and she was like I'm going to tell you about our family story.
• 7:30
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So she types it out and she lists his name is like JW Allen, like she says that.
• 7:35
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So she knew the name of her grandfather and we knew he was white, but like, beyond that, like it's a common name.
• 7:42
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I remember looking for it for years, like I don't know where to look.
• 7:45
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But that Dawes application was so important because it was establishing a timeline.
• 7:50
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like my great-great-grandmother, sarah, she talked about them living in Joplin, missouri, and how my great-grandmother was born in Fort Scott, kansas, and so I had a timeline the number of children they had, what their names were when they separated.
• 8:03
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So that really helped me drill down exactly where to look, because it's one thing to have a man named John Allen and that's so common, and then I could go based off of birth locations on the census.
• 8:16
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But Missouri is a big state, which one is mine.
• 8:20
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So the Dawes application it really helped me drill down and by doing that that's how I found the marriage license and I was like so they really were married and this is in the 1870s in Oklahoma, territory Well Kansas.
• 8:37
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Yeah, so like, but still like at that time that's a little like unheard of, um and and a lot of the people who were being interviewed they were confirming no, he was white, he's a doctor, like they were saying that and I was like, ok, nobody passed that part of the story down at all, but I just I knew this was the right guy.
• 8:56
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I found them on the census.
• 8:58
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Then there were like some younger kids that had a different last name and I remember my dad talking about Uncle Claude, who was my great-grandmother's brother, and that's the whole reason why our family ended up in Los Angeles.
• 9:12
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So my grandparents met on the south side of Chicago, actually more actually downtown, because my grandmother used to work at Linton's, which was a department store, and my grandfather came in there and saw her and like, totally was like enamored with store.
• 9:24
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And my grandfather came in there and saw her and like, totally was like enamored with her and so they started dating and at the time my great aunt, edna, was still living in Chicago.
• 9:32
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Well, her husband died.
• 9:34
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I found out he was actually murdered after like a dice or card game.
• 9:37
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Found that in the newspaper, on newspaperscom.
• 9:39
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: This is the most like murder, mayhem and miscellaneous.
• 9:43
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It's this side of the family.
• 9:44
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So my Aunt, edna, she decides to move to California because Uncle Claude passed away and he didn't have any children and he left his house to my aunt.
• 9:56
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So my aunt left Chicago.
• 9:56
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: My grandmother, in little sister fashion, she follows her sister, and then that's how my family ends up in California.
• 10:02
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And so Uncle Claude was uh, well, he was at one point a shepherd, but he was an Allen too.
• 10:08
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So it was like, well, who was the dad?
• 10:11
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like what's going on?
• 10:12
  Crista Cowan: like I still haven't really reconciled that, because he doesn't have any kids so you knew that they were half siblings, but they had the same last name right, but it's like but I still don't know, because Uncle Claude looked just like my great-grandmother.
• 10:22
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So I think that that's yeah.
• 10:25
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I think that John Allen was his dad too.
• 10:28
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I honestly think that.
• 10:29
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But there were other children.
• 10:31
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: My great-grandmother was the only girl.
• 10:33
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And then Sarah, great-great-grandmother Sarah.
• 10:38
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: She ends up getting remarried to a man with the last name Star.
• 10:40
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It's so funny, her maiden name was Bean and then she marries a star.
• 10:43
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It's a lot of nouns.
• 10:44
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And so she dies in the Indian territory.
• 10:47
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: She comes back, she dies there, but it's like that marriage license.
• 10:53
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And then it was just like, ok, who's this guy?
• 10:55
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And like what's to his story?
• 10:57
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like he's a doctor, the people were talking about that, talking about them living in Joplin and him running a medical practice, and I'm like and this was just kosher here Like what was happening, because at the time, like race relations were like a lot, especially when you're talking about Kansas, right, kansas was bleeding Kansas Like there was a pro slavery faction and a pro-emancipation you know faction and they were fighting like tooth and nail.
• 11:21
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So to have my family kind of in the middle of all of this is just, it was an interesting story.
• 11:26
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So it was like we knew more and we had photos of Sarah.
• 11:30
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But John, yeah him, it was not like that.
• 11:34
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So naturally I start going online, find them together and then our DNA matches start popping up.
• 11:40
  Crista Cowan: Okay, so this is where the story gets so good for me, right?
• 11:44
  Crista Cowan: We're going to kind of pause for just a minute of that piece of the story and we're going to come at this from a totally.
• 11:49
  Crista Cowan: For several years, you and I had kind of become genealogy colleagues in that space and then in 2012, of course, ancestry introduced Ancestry DNA, and you, like me, immediately jumped on testing all the people in your family, and I don't know exactly when it was, but I do remember at some point looking at my mom's DNA match list and seeing you listed there as a DNA match.
• 12:30
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Right At first I was like maybe this another Crista Cowan another , like I remember saying.
• 12:35
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I was like no, this is Crista.
• 12:37
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And I remember I messaged you like hey, so looks like we're cousins.
• 12:41
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And I think I think I might have said like hey, you're going to be there, like let's just like meet up and like we actually like literally have a video of the two of us like in person, like talking about us being related, like right after we found out that yeah, and that was so exciting for me because back then we didn't have nearly the tools we have now, right, and so we didn't always know like which side of the family it was or who the shared matches were.
• 13:04
  Crista Cowan: And it wasn't a lot of shared DNA, it was so little, in fact, that you and I are not DNA matched no, we're not, so I didn't inherit that bit from my mom, and yet we were determined to figure it out and the fact that I knew we were both proficient enough at family history that we could do that was really exciting for me.
• 13:23
  Crista Cowan: But of course, my mom's family is all from the South and I know that she has slaveholders in her family tree, and so my initial immediate assumption was that our connection was going to be through slavery and I, like it wasn't that I was hesitant to confront that, but I hadn't to that point in my family history.
• 13:45
  Crista Cowan: Research really looked into the lives of the people that my family had enslaved, had acknowledged that they were enslavers but hadn't documented anybody that they had enslaved, and so this was, I think, probably the impetus for me to start doing that was just the simple fact that you popped up as a DNA match to me, and all of a sudden I realized that maybe I had an obligation or some kind of a, and duty sounds like such a heavy word, but like I wanted to make sure that I did that, and so I think the thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is the amount of time that sometimes these things take Right, because you and I both worked on it from our separate directions for almost three years.
• 14:29
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Right, it took.
• 14:30
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Yeah, it took a while because, again, we were in the Stone Age from 2013, 2014, 2015.
• 14:38
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: We didn't even have labeling, didn't reflect color coding.
• 14:42
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: We didn't have any of that, we just had.
• 14:43
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Here's your match list.
• 14:44
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Okay, work, you know like that was it.
• 14:45
  Crista Cowan: Root forks, right.
• 14:46
  Crista Cowan: But you had figured out, I think based on some of the information you had, that it was probably a connection through your great grandma, clara, and I had figured out through me, through my family, that it was on my mom's mom's mom's side of the family tree, and so I happened to know a lot about that Shipman family.
• 15:07
  Crista Cowan: I had researched several generations of their descendants and I had little pieces of information and with you and I both coming at it from our separate directions, we finally were able to meet in the middle and kind of connect the dots that it was this Shipman family, and so I'm going to just kind of share it again.
• 15:23
  Crista Cowan: I pulled it up on my phone so that I could make sure I got it correct.
• 15:27
  Crista Cowan: But our common ancestor ancestors are a couple named Daniel Shipman and Elizabeth Burleson, and Daniel Shipman is my six times great grandfather and I think he might be your six times great grandfather as well.
• 15:44
  Crista Cowan: Six or fifth.
• 15:45
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Okay, one of the two.
• 15:46
  Crista Cowan: So that if it's sixth for both of us, that makes us seven of the cousins which I love.
• 15:51
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Okay, that's my favorite number.
• 15:54
  Crista Cowan: There you go.
• 15:54
  Crista Cowan: And Daniel and Elizabeth, you don't know anything about them.
• 15:59
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: We don't know anything about them.
• 16:00
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like still, like it's because John Allen took on a whole other like he is the subject, like probably of like a live webinar session.
• 16:11
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Because once I found him I discovered he married after he married my great-great-grandmother and that there were children from that and then he ended up dying and those kids almost got orphaned.
• 16:25
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So they didn't really know very much about the family.
• 16:27
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So, by just irony, here I was the descendant of the first wife of the black wife telling the descendants of the white wife about their family and people were skeptical, like they were.
• 16:40
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like I'll never forget.
• 16:41
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Actually there was a match I reached out to initially and I knew I was related to this guy this way and he was like there's no way we're related and I was like really, you spit in two, I spit in two.
• 16:51
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: We sent it off to people we did not know and then they just said you, you know what we're going to make them related.
• 16:54
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: That's not how this works.
• 16:56
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And so like I backed off.
• 16:58
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But more cousins kept popping up and it was a trip, like the whole separation were really when he he unfortunately he had mental illness and it was all over the newspaper.
• 17:11
  Crista Cowan: John.
• 17:12
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Allen.
• 17:12
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: John Allen did yeah, he, it was in the newspaper him getting committed to to the mental hospital.
• 17:18
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It was like he was having mental breaks.
• 17:20
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So yeah, he, he eventually ends up dying.
• 17:23
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But the irony is that they sent him to the same county that my great grandmother was living in.
• 17:29
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: He died at the state mental hospital in Veneta, oklahoma, near his daughter, near his daughter.
• 17:34
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So I wonder, did she know that her father was there?
• 17:39
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Did she go to visit him, like I would imagine?
• 17:43
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Maybe because my dad and his first cousins knew the man's name?
• 17:47
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So I don't know, I don't know, she might have.
• 17:50
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that's interesting to think, like when you're a child from a first marriage back in that day did how much you know?
• 17:56
  Crista Cowan: Now parents split custody and there's visitation, and like none of that existed back then.
• 18:01
  Crista Cowan: And so, yeah, did they maintain a relationship or not is an interesting question.
• 18:04
  Crista Cowan: Right, right, yeah.
• 18:06
  Crista Cowan: So John Allen is the son of a man named Albert Allen and a woman named Fenetta.
• 18:12
  Crista Cowan: Lee Fenetta is the daughter of Daniel Lee and Hannah Francisco.
• 18:17
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: That's such a Francisco.
• 18:19
  Crista Cowan: That's fun to say.
• 18:19
  Crista Cowan: The family shortened the name to Cisco in some of the branches of that family tree.
• 18:24
  Crista Cowan: The interesting thing about John's maternal grandparents is that they were first cousins to each other, and they are both grandchildren of Daniel Shipman and Elizabeth Burleson.
• 18:34
  Crista Cowan: And I descend from another child of theirs, jacob, and so, like I mentioned, I have done a lot of research on this particular branch of the family, and so I would love to share the story of Daniel and Elizabeth with you, because I think it's so interesting.
• 18:51
  Crista Cowan: Daniel was born in Germany, and the suspicion is that the original family name was Schuffman, like a German version.
• 19:00
  Crista Cowan: His mother had two sons, and then she and her husband and their two sons set off for Wales from Germany.
• 19:06
  Crista Cowan: So they immigrated from Germany to Wales, and we don't know at which point you know, we don't know exactly at what point her husband died, we don't even aren't even certain of his first name but while she was in Wales she remarried a man with the last name of Gage, and they decided to immigrate to the United States, and so they came, like a lot of those early immigrants, to North Carolina and ended up settling there, and so Daniel has a lot of younger half-siblings With the last name, Gage.
• 19:34
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Okay, so I've seen in my DNA matches.
• 19:37
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: That's why when you said it, it was like ding, Like a light bulb went off, right got it.
• 19:43
  Crista Cowan: Elizabeth.
• 19:43
  Crista Cowan: She was born in Virginia and ended up in North Carolina, but her parents were.
• 19:49
  Crista Cowan: Her father was an immigrant from Wales and her mother was an immigrant from England.
• 19:52
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: That makes sense, my percentage is right.
• 19:56
  Crista Cowan: So I'm also curious if Daniel's mother and stepfather knew Elizabeth's father, like if they were connected somehow, because Wales is not a big place and I don't know exactly where in Wales Daniel's parents lived before they immigrated, but I do know where in Wales Elizabeth's family is from and so you know, did they come to this place because they knew him from there?
• 20:23
  Crista Cowan: Like it's always fascinating to me, like when you start looking at the networks of connections right, and how people make decisions to immigrate or migrate to specific places, there's usually something that pulls them there.
• 20:35
  Crista Cowan: There's usually groups of people who come together.
• 20:37
  Crista Cowan: So that's always super fascinating to me.
• 20:40
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Daniel fought in the Revolutionary War, so if you weren't already a DAR, this is the line I was going to try to do that with, but it was funky, like I couldn't find it was the Albert to John.
• 20:54
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: There was a you know, like I needed that document that said this is the dad and I was having the hardest time and like, luckily, like my state person was like wait a minute, your family's from Oklahoma, like it might be easier to go this way, right, and so that's what we did.
• 21:08
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So my initial, my initial app was through this line Okay, well, there you go.
• 21:12
  Crista Cowan: Okay, well, there you go In both North Carolina and then, I think, they end up in Kentucky, warren County, kentucky, over the course of how many years?
• 21:23
  Crista Cowan: Their oldest child was born in 1740.
• 21:26
  Crista Cowan: Their youngest child was born in 1756.
• 21:28
  Crista Cowan: So they have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine children in 16 years.
• 21:35
  Crista Cowan: You are a descendant of two of them.
• 21:37
  Crista Cowan: I'm a descendant of another one, and then Elizabeth passes and John remarries a much younger woman and has two more children in his old age.
• 21:49
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, his other two children with his next wife are 30 years younger than his youngest child from his first marriage.
• 21:53
  Crista Cowan: Oh boy, right.
• 21:54
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's kind of crazy.
• 21:54
  Crista Cowan: Are 30 years younger than his youngest child from his first marriage.
• 21:57
  Crista Cowan: Oh boy, right, yeah, it's kind of crazy, but from these nine children of Daniel and Elizabeth, so far I have uncovered, based on DNA matches and lots of other things, about 7,600 descendants which is kind of crazy and you start looking at the patterns of this family and where they end up and what they do in helping, you know, to build the country.
• 22:23
  Crista Cowan: It's kind of fascinating.
• 22:24
  Crista Cowan: There's lots of stories in there, but for me the best story that came out of it is that you and I are related.
• 22:31
  Crista Cowan: Like it's our own little declaration descendant right?
• 22:34
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, super fun.
• 22:36
  Crista Cowan: Our own little declaration to send it?
• 22:39
  Crista Cowan: Right?
• 22:40
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, super fun.
• 22:40
  Crista Cowan: Um, and so when once you and I figured out this connection, we were able to kind of put because I didn't have john allen in my tree because he went missing from the family, right, I knew, you know, I knew about his mother and I had um, I kind of thought her husband's name was albert allen, but I wasn't 100 sure.
• 22:54
  Crista Cowan: Uh, but then when you came at it from the other direction, those puzzle pieces kind of locked into place and now we have this whole other branch of the family tree because of that DNA connection and because we were willing to figure that out.
• 23:06
  Crista Cowan: So, I love that, me too, so fun.
• 23:09
  Crista Cowan: Okay, well, as you mentioned that, you've gone through your DNA matches and you keep finding names you recognize from this the Siscos or Franciscos, the Gages, the Shipmans, the Allens, like there's so many people in this family.
• 23:24
  Crista Cowan: You know how do you like approach that?
• 23:27
  Crista Cowan: Are you always, when you're working with your DNA matches, trying to solve a specific problem or are you just trying to figure out who they are and how they fit?
• 23:35
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I would say it's both Like I think especially if someone reaches out first and they're eager, like hey, I'm looking at this thing and it may be a part of my tree that like I haven't looked at in a while, usually it like calls me to come back.
• 23:47
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And then the other thing too is like I'm like you know what I really got to figure this out.
• 23:51
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So it's kind of that revisiting, like going back and just looking over and over and over again at the same stuff we've been looking at, you know, maybe seeing if there's new records or collections that are out that might help answer like the question.
• 24:04
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I mean I like it for both.
• 24:05
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You know anybody who's doing genealogy and is like really into it.
• 24:08
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: We love puzzles, we love trying to figure things out, and some of the puzzles are more longstanding and take years to figure out.
• 24:17
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Some of them you get answers immediately.
• 24:19
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So that's just the give or take of this, you know, and whatever you pour into it, you're going to get it back at some point.
• 24:26
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You just don't know when you are.
• 24:28
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, well said, very well said.
• 24:30
  Crista Cowan: I love that, well love this story right Now.
• 24:34
  Crista Cowan: I'm super excited that I know more about great grandma Clara.
• 24:37
  Crista Cowan: That's always super fun.
• 24:38
  Crista Cowan: Um, and as we look at this, john, you said John died in a mental hospital.
• 24:46
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and in the same county where great grandma Clara was living.
• 24:50
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Yeah, where and where my grandmother was born wow um, I want to say it was within a month of my grandmother's birth.
• 24:58
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It was close to it because it was it was in 1919.
• 25:01
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And I was like is that the right person?
• 25:04
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And I ordered the death certificate and I was like it's the right guy.
• 25:07
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Yeah, and you know, and then our family kind of ended up where, like, some of my great grandmother's younger siblings were in like Washington State and like California and some of them stayed in Oklahoma, or siblings were in like Washington state and like California and some of them stayed in Oklahoma, or they were in Kansas or Missouri.
• 25:22
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And so we were like spread all over the place and you know, it's just, it's been crazy, like tracing everyone and like looking up their lives and what they were doing and like, and so you know, I mean that's the thing too, especially when you're engaging with people like and they don't know what, they don't really know the heart of what you want to get out of it.
• 25:42
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And so that person may have thought, like these salacious things you know, potentially salacious things might were like the, the.
• 25:49
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: That was the story.
• 25:52
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But the story was not that.
• 25:53
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It was just a very dimensional man and had he struggled with things and the fact that it was very public, you know, and that his descendants are going through the newspaper, like finding some of this stuff, like for some people who compete, you know completely that might be genetic, that no one knew, that they couldn't attribute, and so there's so many different ways of like looking at it.
• 26:18
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But, like, for me, I feel like what I've gained from it is the ability to like tell my family like, yes, this oral history we had about this guy being this white guy is right, but also like he was a multidimensional man, you know, one of the things I really wanted to dig into more is just like what did he practice for medicine, you know, and like what was that?
• 26:39
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Where did he go to school?
• 26:40
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Where was he educated?
• 26:42
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like I mean, you know, that's the only ancestor I have that has a profession like that, that I know.
• 26:46
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So I've been thinking about that.
• 26:48
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And then also just with family members, it's great, like when someone new pops up and they're just like you know, oh, okay, this part of the tree is already built out.
• 26:59
  Crista Cowan: You know, we don't have to try to sit and figure it out so Well.
• 27:00
  Crista Cowan: And there's also something interesting that you mentioned earlier about the interracial marriage.
• 27:03
  Crista Cowan: Yes, in that time, in that place, I have records that show that most of his family was still pretty much in that vicinity.
• 27:10
  Crista Cowan: Yes, my great grandmother and her family all lived in the northwest corner of Arkansas, which is right there, right there, right.
• 27:16
  Crista Cowan: And like, who knew, who didn't know, who was supportive, who was not only not supportive but maybe antagonistic about that Right, and did any of that have any effect on the fact that their marriage eventually failed?
• 27:30
  Crista Cowan: Or was that because of his mental health issues?
• 27:32
  Crista Cowan: Right, his mental health issues, or like there's just.
• 27:36
  Crista Cowan: That's one of the things that I love about family history is the stories that we find, but then also the questions that still need answering.
• 27:42
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Because that's the thing, every discovery leads to another question.
• 27:45
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like we keep thinking, oh, it's gonna solve the world, and it's like, no, this is gonna lead to another question.
• 27:51
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And that's because we're all curious, like that's, that's what got us here.
• 27:55
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Is is, is our curiosity and yeah, I often wonder, like, how their families reacted to it.
• 28:01
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And you know, again, a lot of times, when people you know share DNA on this side, they are, they are a little fearful or scared that that the connection is enslavement.
• 28:12
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I'm like, oh, no, not on this side.
• 28:14
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You know what I mean.
• 28:14
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: There's, there's other possibilities, and so that's the other part we have to.
• 28:18
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: We have to leave ourselves open for like different interpretations or, um, like different scenarios than what we initially think of, because I walked into it like that too, and so I was like, actually, it's not that, like, this is a very clear path.
• 28:33
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So, um, yeah, there's, there's a lot of terrain out there and we think we know, based on our 21st century, I like thought, but we don't always know.
• 28:42
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah.
• 28:44
  Crista Cowan: And it's interesting because I think, because I thought it was going to be a relationship between you and I and enslavement, I was looking further back than I needed to and I was looking like further afield than I needed to when the information about John's family I already had it in my tree but I was trying to like find something different because I had that preconceived notion and when I kind of let that go and just let the records and the DNA tell the story for me and lead me, then the connection was made, which I love.
• 29:16
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Yeah, sometimes we shoehorn in genealogy, you know, we're like trying to force a thing.
• 29:20
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: You know, there's a lady that I was in a genealogy society with and I often think about her.
• 29:25
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: She had this binder and she had her stuff all in, you know, and she was trying to validate this story.
• 29:30
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like that was the only thing she cared about.
• 29:33
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: The whole rest of the tree it did not matter.
• 29:36
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: She was trying to validate that this man was her ancestor.
• 29:39
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: That was it.
• 29:40
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So every meeting she came to, that was her sole focus and she would not move and all the evidence was telling her it's not him.
• 29:48
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: But she refused to listen because she was shoehorning just everything in.
• 29:52
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And I often think about that from the vantage point of like, what am I trying to do that with?
• 29:58
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Like, what am I trying to to to make into something that it, that it isn't, and what happens when I let go and when I take my hands off of it and say you know what?
• 30:05
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Let me just see where the evidence leads me as opposed to, it's gotta be this, you know, and, yeah, I, I don't want to be the lady with the binder.
• 30:16
  Crista Cowan: Well, there are plenty of interesting stories without us having to force them Right.
• 30:19
  Crista Cowan: Well, as you think about great-grandma Clara and John and what you've learned about him so far and our connection and how that all came about, what is it like, just in that context, that you hope for the future?
• 30:33
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: context that you hope for the future.
• 30:33
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I think there are so many more stories like this and people just don't know because they again, like both of us, walk in with like preconceived notions.
• 30:42
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And I think, as records become more available, as varied stories get told, as people hear us talking about this, they may be more open to what's a possibility, as opposed to just assuming that it's one thing rather than something else.
• 30:57
  Crista Cowan: So your grandmother, that you knew she was born in Oklahoma.
• 31:01
  Crista Cowan: Now, because of this research and this story, you've discovered that her grandfather, john Allen, died in Oklahoma right around that same time.
• 31:10
  Crista Cowan: As you think about the state of Oklahoma like, what does that you know mean to you and your family history?
• 31:17
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Well, for me it's a central part of it, like there is there kind of is not me without Oklahoma.
• 31:23
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: For me, when I go, like I have to stop by the train station that my ancestor died at.
• 31:29
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I have to go there every time.
• 31:31
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I have to kind of set my feet there and I might be in Tulsa for the majority of the trip, but like I have to go to Veneta, I have to go to Muskogee, I have to go to all these places that I remember them going to and and hearing about, and reading about and all of that.
• 31:47
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And in the extreme northern portion of the Cherokee Nation, like almost to Kansas, like I feel like I have to go to those places just a way to commune with them.
• 32:01
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And often I will go to my great-grandparents' land allotment.
• 32:02
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: I'll go there and I'll go next to the creek that was by the house that my uncle talked about him being a child, and I remember the first time I went there, I went and I took a video and I, you know, posted it in the cousin's chat and my one cousin that's when she told me she's like oh my gosh, papa Daddy used to talk about that creek all the time and how, whenever he would go back home he'd always have to go to the creek.
• 32:20
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: And I didn't know this, I had no idea, but I was drawn to that same water.
• 32:25
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: So for me it's like a reset a little bit whenever I go there.
• 32:30
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Oklahoma is kind of like.
• 32:31
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: It's like the center of the world with regard to my family there.
• 32:37
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, they're the places that made them Right and we get to set our feet on them Right.
• 32:41
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 32:42
  Crista Cowan: Well, I am always proud to call you my cousin, same but I think I'm even more proud to call you my colleague.
• 32:50
  Crista Cowan: Your example of just tenacity and persistence in making the discoveries that you make and your willingness to be open and to see where things lead, I think, has just been such an example to me in the decade and a half now that we've known each other Teenager Almost.
• 33:09
  Crista Cowan: So, thank you, thank you for being delightful.
• 33:12
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for being my three-peat guest.
• 33:14
  Crista Cowan: Yes, yes, thank you for being here.
• 33:16
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for being my three-peat guest.
• 33:17
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Yes, yes, absolutely.
• 33:17
  Nicka Sewell-Smith: Thank you for being here, awesome.
• 33:19
  Crista Cowan: Thanks for having me Studio sponsored by Ancestry.