note: ancestry screenshots are anchored to my grandfather, manley ray bell (1927-2003). i'm his granddaughter, courtney crosslin (sisi in brasil). to find my direct relationship to any ancestor shown, add one generation --- e.g., "11th great-grandfather" becomes my 12th great-grandfather.
research and archival work: p. pierson (family). genealogical expert: angela walton-raji.
i sat on my balcony in barra, salvador, bahia — the yoruba capital of the western hemisphere — and read a document that traces my bloodline back to 1516.
five hundred years. documented. confirmed. cross-referenced against census records, dawes rolls, tribal treaties, colonial documents, and ship manifests.
i already knew pieces. i knew i was chickasaw, cherokee, yoruba, choctaw, powhatan. i knew my DNA confirmed it. but i didn’t know the full scope until i sat down with screen recordings of my ancestry.com tree, ran them through extraction tools, organized the data, and then let google’s deep research engine cross-reference every name against verified historical records.
what came back shook me.
the names that showed up
my 12th great-grandfather is chief wahunsenacawh (…”whose proper name was Wahunsenacawh (alternately spelled Wahunsenacah, Wahunsunacock, or Wahunsonacock”). the man the english colonists had to negotiate with when they arrived in virginia in 1607.
“Little is known of Powhatan’s life before the arrival of English colonists in 1607. He apparently inherited the leadership of about 4–6 tribes, with its base at the Fall Line near present-day Richmond. Through diplomacy or force, he had formed the Powhatan Confederacy from about 30 tribes by the early 17th century. The confederacy included an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people.” via widipedia
his daughter — pocahontas — is my 11th great-grandaunt. not folklore. not a disney movie. my actual documented family.
before you make any conculusiolns about HERstory — consider the following very different perspectives.
- “Contrary to Disney’s portrayal of this well-known ‘family film,’ the true story of Pocahontas is not one of a romance, but a tragedy. Pocahontas was one of the first real-life Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).” via the indigenous foundation”
- “…And historians are divided over whether Pocahontas, then about 11 or 12 years old, rescued the mercantile soldier and explorer at all. Smith might have misinterpreted what was actually a ritual ceremony or even just lifted the tale from a popular Scottish ballad.” via the smithsonian magazine
opechancanough, the war chief who launched a coordinated surprise attack on the english in 1622 and killed a quarter of their population in virginia — that’s my line too. he fought until he was nearly 100 years old. they shot him in prison.
