NARA NATIVE AMERICANS LINK
I noticed that my post on proving Native American ancestry has been getting a lot of hits, so I thought I would post this helpful link which leads to lots and lots of other informative links including Dawes Rolls and Guion-Miller Roll as well as Census Enumeration of Pueblo Indians, 1790-1939.
THESE ARE SPECIAL COUNTS OF NATIVE AMERICANS separate from the NATIONAL CENSUS or STATE CENSUS.
So... What if you think you have Native American ancestry but no known member of your family is "card carrying" members of a tribe with reservation rights?
I may have said it before, but it's worth repeating. Census records are the backbone of American genealogy but everything you read on them may not be right and when it comes to "color" or race or ethnicity, what you see written down may be the word of the reporting individual (hopefully a family member but sometimes a neighbor) or the opinion of the census taker.
I've seen someone called Black or Negro when living in the American South who was called White in Chicago. I've seen large farm families who proved to have a Native American ancestor with one child called Black and the rest called White - and across the street another farm where they were all listed as Indian.
We can learn about the niche specific attitudes about race and color and ethnicity from this though, can't we?
