Catawba Indian Genealogy

I began this project when I was in grade school. I knew we were Catawba, but when I went to school, it became obvious that I was different than my classmates. So I looked up Catawba in our new 50's World Books and it said it was a grape. It took more years and more research to find that indeed there was a homeland in South Carolina and that there were lots of Cantys, Scotts and other names I knew from my own genealogy.So, after marrying and collecting my husband's genealogy which was vast, I turned to the Catawba research, along with my mother's genealogy, I collected and collected. Genealogy became my life's work besides my kids and husband and other family activities. I became a professional genealogist, or at least I got paid for some, and this enabled me to continue on into the computer era.So that is how I came from a grape to a Catawba daughter, wife and mother of today.

"Brooke M. Bauer's 'Becoming Catawba: Catawba Women and Nation-Building, 1540-1840' is the first book-length study of the role Catawba women played in creating and preserving a cohesive tribal identity over three centuries of colonization and cultural turmoil. Emerging from distinct ancestral groups who shared a family of languages and lived in the Piedmont region of what would become the Carolinas, the Yę Iswą-the People of the River, or Catawba-coalesced over centuries of catastrophic disruption and traumatic adaptation into, first, a confederacy of Piedmont Indians and eventually the Catawba nation. Bauer, a member of the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, employs the Catawba language and traditions in conjunction with a diverse array of historical materials and archaeological data to explore Catawba history from within, where matrilineal kinship systems, land use customs, and pottery informed women's traditional authority in coalition with their male counterparts. 'Becoming Catawba' examines the lives and legacies of women who executed complex decision-making and diplomacy to navigate shifting frameworks of kinship, land ownership, and cultural production in dealings with colonial encroachments, white settlers, and Euro-American legal systems and governments from the mid-sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Personified in the figure of Sally New River, a Catawba leader to whom 500 remaining acres of occupied tribal lands were deeded on behalf of the community in 1796 and which she managed until her death in 1821, Bauer reveals how women worked to ensure the survival of the Catawba people and their Catawba identity, an effort that resulted in a unified nation. Bauer's approach is primarily ethnohistorical, although it draws on a number of interdisciplinary strategies. In particular, Bauer uses 'upstreaming,' a critical strategy that moves towards the period under study by using present-day community members' connections to historical knowledge-for example, family histories and oral traditions-to interpret primary-source data. Additionally, Bauer employs archaeological data and material culture as a means of performing feminist recuperation, filling the gaps and silences left by the records, newspapers, and historical accounts as primarily written by and for white men. This strategy functions in tandem with Bauer's use of the Catawba language to provide a window into Catawba identity, politics, and worldviews, and thus to decolonize Southern history. Both approaches work to decenter the experiences of the mostly male, mostly white people who dominate the histories of the period under study, allowing Bauer to foreground the concerns of Catawba women and their foremothers in the history of the region. Existing histories of the Catawba-and the Southeastern Indians in general-tend not to discuss women much at all, focusing instead on the traditionally male-dominated political and military interactions between Native men and European colonizers. Although there are book-length archaeological studies of the Catawba that engage with women's roles and activities, none of these assign agency or operate within a temporal frame as broad as Bauer's. The historical scope of 'Becoming Catawba' allows Bauer to demonstrate the evolving tensions between cultural change and continuity that the Catawba were forced to navigate, and to bring greater nuance to the examination of the shifting relationship between gender and power that lies at the core of the book. Ultimately, 'Becoming Catawba' effects a welcome intervention at the intersections of Native, women's, and Southern history, expanding the diversity and modes of experience in the fraught, multifaceted cultural environment of the early American South"--

The Catawba Indians are aboriginal to South Carolina, and their pottery tradition may be traced to 2,400 B.C. When Hernando de Soto visited the Catawba Nation (then Cofitachique) in 1540, he found a sophisticated Mississippian Culture. After the founding of Charleston in 1670, the Catawba population declined. Throughout subsequent demographic stress, the Catawba supported themselves by making and peddling pottery. They have the only surviving Native American pottery tradition east of the Mississippi. Without pottery, there would be no Catawba Indian Nation today.

No group of Native Americans has figured more prominently in the history of South Carolina than the Catawba Nation. This tribe¿s unerring military, economic, and symbolic support for the fledgling Carolina colonies was crucial during early conflicts with hostile tribes, and eventually their struggle for Independence. While the Palmetto State unabashedly profited from this relationship with the Catawba Nation, the association was not mutually beneficial.In the hundred-year time span between 1740 and 1840, the population of the Catawba reservation decreased by more than seventy-five percent. At least half this decrease was due to the mortality of old age, accident, and disease. A significant portion of that population reduction, however, was the result of outmigration, as Catawba left the confines of the reservation to explore life in other areas.At various times in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, no more than a handful of Catawba Indians were physically residing on their ancient reservation. While thousands of pages have been dedicated to memorializing the history of those Catawba who remained, the pen of the historian has remained silent in regard to those Indian families and individuals who left the reservation.What happened to those Catawba who abandoned their ancient homeland? Where did they ultimately settle down? Did they continue to self-Identify as ¿Catawba¿ or, in some respects even more importantly, were they recorded as ¿Catawba¿ or even as ¿Indian¿ by the census enumerator, tax collector, or court officials in these new areas? This book attempts to answer these questions, and memorialize the documentation of those who became ¿A Wandering Tribe.¿

The Genealogy Annual is a comprehensive bibliography of the year's genealogies, handbooks, and source materials. It is divided into three main sections. FAMILY HISTORIES-cites American and international single and multifamily genealogies, listed alphabetically by major surnames included in each book. GUIDES AND HANDBOOKS-includes reference and how-to books for doing research on specific record groups or areas of the U.S. or the world. GENEALOGICAL SOURCES BY STATE-consists of entries for genealogical data, organized alphabetically by state and then by city or county. The Genealogy Annual, the core reference book of published local histories and genealogies, makes finding the latest information easy. Because the information is compiled annually, it is always up to date. No other book offers as many citations as The Genealogy Annual; all works are included. You can be assured that fees were not required to be listed.