Quatie

I’m just glad to be here, happy to be alive.

I discovered through Ancestry.com (if their “hints” are correct, and if my acceptance of various hints is correct) that I have some Cherokee ancestry.

Going back seven generations, there is a woman—Elizabeth “Quatie” Brown, later Elizabeth Henley, later Elizabeth Ross—my fifth great-grandmother. “Quatie” is apparently an anglicization of her Cherokee name, “Que-ti.”¹ Quatie is notable for a couple of things: 1) she married John Ross, the first and only elected chief of the Cherokee Nation²  (John was one-eighth Cherokee,³ but he’s not my ancestor on the paternal side, Henley is, and I don’t know much about him yet); and 2) she died of pneumonia on the Trail of Tears (on the steamboat portion of it, that is, steaming down the Arkansas River). There is a legend that she gave her blanket to a shivering child sometime before dying, but the evidence for this is pretty tenuous.⁴

Quatie was born in the old Cherokee Nation in present-day Georgia, and she is buried in Little Rock.⁵

Her father was named either Thomas or James Brown. Either way, I’m sure he was the hardest working man on the… you know. His dad was apparently Alexander William Brown, who was possibly a chief of the Shawnee.⁶ 

Brown-Henley begat a daughter, who married a Pogue from Tennessee. The Pogues eventually traveled to Texas, and eked out hardscrabble lives in places like Erath, Motley and Hardeman Counties. Comanche country!

The Pogues, incidentally, may also include some nobility in their ancestry, way back in Ireland. Apparently, back in the day they were Polk or Pollock or de Pollock. Some yokels on Ancestry place a lot of extra words into the name fields, such as… First Name: “Col. Robert B. Chancellor of Ireland”, Last Name: “Polk/Pollock/de Pollock.” Hey, thanks for the tip, but respect the fields, man.

My great-grandfather Pogue and his wife made it to Dallas, where they lived in a modest house on Lancaster Ave., which is in Oak Cliff, a neighborhood that has recently become gentrified. Great-grampa’s house is now a vacant lot. Maybe someone is going to build a McMansion on it.

Gentrified or not… I tell you, looking at the street view, it doesn’t look like much.

I will tell you one thing I’ve learned doing genealogical research: People reproduced like rabbits back in the day. I’ve seen lots of couples who had upwards of eight, ten kids. You know what that is: That’s human capital.

I’m not sure what I will do with this newfound knowledge of my Native American ancestry. Maybe I can use it to get into a good law school. If I do well and get a career as a “rainmaker,” well, I can drag this family tree out of reservations and modest houses. I just need to find a wife and start reproducing.

Oh, yeah, if Ancestry is right about another branch of my tree, the Hester male line goes way back—to at least the 1600s. Francis Hester, 1664-1720. Born in Virginia.

And on the other end there’s me. If I don’t get busy reproducing… it could be… The end of the line.

Well… Is it all right?

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Notes

¹ Berry, Cody Lynn. “Quatie Ross (1791-1839).” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/quatie-ross-12527/ (accessed August 30, 2019)
² Ibid.
³ “John Ross (Cherokee Chief).” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ross_(Cherokee_chief) (accessed August 30, 2019)
⁴ Berry.
⁵ “Elizabeth Quatie Brown Ross.” Find a Grave, www.findagrave.com/memorial/19654 (accessed August 30, 2019)
⁶ “Jones Family Tree.” Ancestry, www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/22449418/person/18194877101/facts (accessed August 30, 2019)