Genealogy and Family Lore

From: Rex Murphy - The shame of Fauxcohontas - National Post, May 12, 2012
Anne Coulter - Dances With Lies - May 10, 2012

Harvard Law professor, Elizabeth Warren, is running for a senate seat in Ted Kennedy’s old district.

During the campaign it was revealed that she had listed her minority status in law school faculty directories and that the Harvard Crimson in 1998 declared in print that: “Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American.”

Warren denied using her minority heritage to get hired at any university but she still wanted to make very clear her intense pride in her “native heritage.

She knew she was part native American because it was family lore that her great-great-great grandmother had high cheek bones.

Her family’s lore, if accepted as fact, makes her at most 1/32nd native.

The Boston Globe defended Warren, quoting a genealogist who found a marriage license on which Warren's great-great-uncle scribbled that his mother, Warren's great-great-great grandmother, was a Cherokee.

Soon, however, the evidence suggested she wasn't even 1/32nd Cherokee. The census records for 1860 list the great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, as "white." Also, Warren's family isn't listed in the Cherokee registry.

On the other hand, we have what her son scribbled on his marriage license -- something, by the way, that none of his siblings claimed about their mother.

Family lore is not proof. Proof is contemporary documentation, produced under penalty of perjury, such as a census record.

Now it's beginning to look like her ancestors not only did not suffer as Cherokees but caused their suffering.

The great-great-great-grandfather married to O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford turns out to have been one of the white enforcers on the brutal Trail of Tears, helping round up Indians from their homes in order to march them to a less desirable part of the country.