How can I trace my bloodline?

Question:

How can I trace my bloodline?

I know I have at least 4 great-great grandparents that were full blood Native American all from different sides of the family. They all married white people so 2 of my great-grandma's were 1/2 Indian and there were 2 great-great grandpa's that were full Indian as well. All from the Oklahoma area and I know one of the grandma's were Cherokee.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: You will need to start with yourself and one of the best things you can do to get started is to go to www.familysearch.org and print out their free forms and also download their free genealogy program called PAF.

This will help you to fill in the blanks and document your trail. Once you have some forms to work on you will put yourself as the number 1 person on the pedigree chart and fill it out as far back as you can. Fill in as much information as you can from your own knowledge. Birth dates, death dates, marriage dates and where these events took place. You can probably fill out at least 3 generations and maybe 4. After that take it to your parents and ask them to help you fill in more blanks. If your grandparents are still alive then you will also ask them to fill in as much as they know.

You will want to exhaust all the family you can find to get as much information as you can. Also while talking to them ask them to tell you as much as they remember about the family. Make sure you take a tape recorder because you will not be able to write fast enough and you don't want to miss anything.

Once you have as much information as you can get from family members then your real search will begin. The first thing you will want to do is try and get your documentation for what you do know already. This is birth certificates, death certificates and marriage licenses. Your birth and death certificates will also give you additional names of parents and spouses. Once you have this documentation then you will need to start trying to find your missing information and one good way to do this can be the census. You know that your family came from Oklahoma so start with the census indexes for Oklahome and find them and look at these records. On many of them it will tell you age, race, family members, and such. This will also help you to pinpoint in what county your family was in so you can find records.

Once you can determine what tribe your family belongs to then you will need to do some research into those tribes to discover what records are available for research to try and find them on tribal records. For the 5 Civilized Tribes the first records would be your Dawes Rolls.

The best tip I can give you is to always insure that you document where you have found each piece of information so that you can 1. return to the source if needed and 2. help you to not rehash over records you have already looked at.

The second bit of information I can give you is to join one of the many Yahoo Groups that specialize in Genealogy. Try and find one that actually take the time to help its members. One that I would recommend is my group called Native American Genealogy at