Recently someone asked me for some advice on researching their BLACKFEET Native American roots. At the Los Angeles Public Library genealogy section - downtown- I checked to see if any books were available on this subject.
I found CENSUS OF THE BLACKFEET - MONTANA 1897-1898
The book was put out by Jeff Bower C 2004 and it leans on the original census taking by
George B. McLaughlin and Thomas P Fuller who were "Indian agents" and also on NATIONAL ARCHIVES FILM COLLECTION ROLL M595-4
I learned that there were four reservations and that this census is one of them. (One of the four reservations is in Canada.) Looking over the census, I saw that the names were translated into English. There was also a great number of family groups that included two wives, which makes knowing which wife is a child's mother a question. As usual, I greatly enjoyed the names such as Morning Plume (a husband), a family group headed by husband Shoots At Another and his wife Martha Shoots at Another and their children Martha and Josephine Weather Wax, Longtime Sleeping, and so on.
I learned that the Blackfeet name comes from the look of ashes on their moccasins. (But as I understand it, there were other not-related tribes called Blackfoot or Blackfeet so be sure you want this Algonquian speaking group found in Montana!)
I decided to see if I could bring up the 1900 census with some of these names using Heritage Quest and Ancestry Genealogy Databases. After all this census was just a couple years after these special counts.
THE PROBLEM WAS, if you have a name such as "Shoots At Another", is your given name "Shoots" or "Shoots At" or is" Another" a surname or is "At Another" a surname?
I was completely unsuccessful using my short list on Heritage Quest and almost completely unsuccessful using Ancestry. But I was able to bring up SOME OF THE NAMES IN THIS AREA OF MONTANA by using the word BLACKFEET!
So here is my advice should you wish to proceed electronically! Just get to THE Enumeration District (ED) THAT CONTAINS SOME OF THE NAMES that do come up through standard given and surname searches (non-native names) so that you are in the neighborhood and then read the census page by page - just as you would if you used GOOD OLD MICROFILM!
