Early in life, Anne Donald Muffley had been told that she had Cherokee ancestry. Research subsequently revealed that the ancestry was actually Shawnee and Choctaw.Gary has Cherokee and Choctaw ancestry (see Jagger Blog, under Betsy Glenn Weidenhamer).
In 1806 in Ohio a Shawnee baby girl was born. At some point she was orphaned, and then adopted by the family of Benjamin and Mary Apriorson Ford. The girl was named Nancy Elizabeth Shaw (short for Shawnee), and later she acquired the Ford surname. In 1823, in Ross County, Ohio, Nancy married Alfred O’Bryant. Alfred’s mother was reportedly Choctaw. Alfred’s parents had reportedly lived at Hickory, Newton County,Mississippi. Alfred and Nancy Ford O’Bryant were third-great-grandparents of Anne, so comprised two of her 32 third-great-grandparents.
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| Nancy Elizabeth Shaw Ford O'Bryant |
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| Nancy Elizabeth Shaw Ford O'Bryant |
Alfred and Nancy Ford O’Bryant had a son Pleasant O’Bryant, who was possibly born in 1829 in
Licking County
,
Ohio
. Part of
Buckeye
Lake
is in that county. Anne and Gary have boated on
Buckeye
Lake
, which lies east of
Columbus
. The O’Bryant family moved on to
Fulton County
,
Illinois
. It was there that Pleasant O’Bryant married Amy Annie Clark in 1848. Her maternal grandfather Thomas Royal fought in the American Revolution; his particulars can be found through the DAR website
http://services.dar.org/public/dar_research/search/?tab_id=0
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| Alfred and Nancy Ford O'Bryant |
Pleasant and Amy Annie Clark O’Bryant were the parents of Lydia Lillie Lee "Anna" O'Bryant (born in 1864 in Illinois). In 1883, Anna married Jesse Retherford Jr. in Cowley County, Kansas. So, this is how our Retherford line of interest came to have Native American ancestry.
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| M.C.R. 852 |
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| M.C.R. 852 |
Pleasant O’Bryant reportedly could not prove his Choctaw ancestry to the satisfaction of Oklahoma authorities tasked with awarding limited numbers of Indian benefits to some of the many applicants. The same thing happened to Gary’s Glenn kin who definitely had Choctaw ancestry, as supported by huge volumes of testimony and other documents. Nowadays we can also add genetic evidence.
