Excerpt from Comes to The Light - Chapter 8 – The Senior Family
My research for my great grandfather, Johnnie Senior a.k.a. Papa Johnnie, was straightforward. This was a blessing coming out of researching other complicated family lines. Johnnie was the son of Johnnie and Jane Senior. He was the seventh child out of ten. The names of Johnnie and Jane’s children were: Versey, Alice, Agnes, Anna, Moses, Henderson, Johnnie (Papa Johnnie), Job, Elvira, and Jane. I was told by my mother that Papa Johnnie was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian.
During the mid to late 1870s the Federal Government recognized only five tribes: Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, and Seminole who was a group of Native American nations that the term was applied by Anglo-European settlers during the colonial and early federal period because these tribes had adopted many of the colonists' customs and generally, had good relations with the white settlers. If I were to learn more about a Native American connection, I would have to access a completely different set of genealogical records pertaining specifically to Native Americans from the East Coast and Mississippi River Valley region. So, when I started to call around it seemed I needed to prove that I personally was of Native American heritage before I could get into those records. I was confused because I needed those records to prove my Native American Heritage. I was in a catch twenty-two.
My cousin Sheila had introduced me to a Native American chief and he tried to explain to me how to start researching my Native American heritage. He gave me quite a bit to read. It was so much reading that I realized this research was something totally different. The time devoted to this would take me in a different direction from what I was doing. I didn’t want to stop the roll I was on, but I promised both him and myself that I would come back to it. ...For more on Papa Johnnie purchase the book Comes to The Light: Learning About the Entangled Families of Edgefield, South Carolina
