and verify the pedigrees of the six core families back to the time of French rule; and formulate guidelines for future admission based on a study of other tribes’ practices. This basic work would help the tribe in establishing its enrollment office, the in-house genealogical department that, in most tribes, reviews the claims of applicants for tribal membership.
Of course, many of the applicants would want as their genealogist someone familiar with the case, someone who could work on a friendly basis with the tribe—namely, Nick. He hoped he’d finally found his own oil well that would pump cash for years to come. Few people got rich in genealogy. Nick wouldn’t mind being one of them.
This morning he planned to travel back centuries to colonial Louisiana. He looked around to make sure no library worker lurked about, and poured a steaming cup of black coffee-and-chicory from hisThermos. The scruffy graduate students and junior professors sighed at the delicious aroma. One or two whimpered.
Nick was well versed in the standard works of Louisiana history. He had riffled through two of his favorites, Le Page du Pratz’s
Histoire de La Louisiane
and Giraud’s
A History of French Louisiana
, which were in his own library at his office—he’d bought them for a dollar each at a garage sale some years before. He had also browsed through archaeological and ethnographic periodicals for more recent investigatory leads.
The earliest description of the Katogoula that he’d found was in a 1771 narrative by the French explorer Jean-Bernard Bossu. He also had reviewed the accounts of Thomas Hutchins, William Bartram, Baudry de Lozieres, and other explorers and soldiers of various nationalities, who, in official reports and memoirs, told of later contacts with the tribe. These men wrote that the Katogoula were part of the Sangfleuve Confederation, dominated by the Chitiko and the Tiloasha, powerful tribes which had been in existence centuries before the arrival of the Europeans.
French-Canadian missionary priests who visited the Katogoula gave up trying to learn the tribe’s original language, though it was apparently Muskogean in character, superficially akin to Choctaw. U.S. Indian Agent John Sibley, President Jefferson’s friend and appointee, reported in 1808 that he made himself intelligible using Mobilian Jargon, a composite language based on Choctaw, Chickasaw, and loan words from the European tongues. With the Katogoula, as with many other tribes forced to deal with the colonial powers, Mobilian Jargon—more precisely, Mobilian K, an evolving variant—became the accepted language around the middle of the eighteenth century, during the last years of the French regime.
Leaning back with his head wedged in his palms, Nick squandered a few minutes staring at the wall, pondering the ancient helix of chance and determination weaving through the new and strong friendship that had formed between Tommy and his Katogoula tribe, and Chief Claude and the Chitiko-Tiloasha . . .
At length he sat up, shook his head, and flexed his shoulders. Another bout of aimless philosophizing wasn’t getting him anywhere. He forced his attention back to the slanted viewing surface of the microfilm reader.
The Internet was certainly a boon to the modern genealogist; yet, Nick took perverse pleasure in the fact that all the servers in the world couldn’t hold the century upon century of genealogical material contained in courthouses, places of worship, governmental agencies, libraries, attics, basements. . . . The day might come when the world’s genealogical source material would be captured in bytes, but it wasn’t here now. Real genealogy still required the researcher to physically venture into the field for patient spade and brush work, just as any good archaeologist would think it necessary to crawl around on hands and knees in an excavation. In both disciplines, part of the art was knowing where to dig and what to seek.
Hichborn
Of course, many of the applicants would want as their genealogist someone familiar with the case, someone who could work on a friendly basis with the tribe—namely, Nick. He hoped he’d finally found his own oil well that would pump cash for years to come. Few people got rich in genealogy. Nick wouldn’t mind being one of them.
This morning he planned to travel back centuries to colonial Louisiana. He looked around to make sure no library worker lurked about, and poured a steaming cup of black coffee-and-chicory from hisThermos. The scruffy graduate students and junior professors sighed at the delicious aroma. One or two whimpered.
Nick was well versed in the standard works of Louisiana history. He had riffled through two of his favorites, Le Page du Pratz’s
Histoire de La Louisiane
and Giraud’s
A History of French Louisiana
, which were in his own library at his office—he’d bought them for a dollar each at a garage sale some years before. He had also browsed through archaeological and ethnographic periodicals for more recent investigatory leads.
The earliest description of the Katogoula that he’d found was in a 1771 narrative by the French explorer Jean-Bernard Bossu. He also had reviewed the accounts of Thomas Hutchins, William Bartram, Baudry de Lozieres, and other explorers and soldiers of various nationalities, who, in official reports and memoirs, told of later contacts with the tribe. These men wrote that the Katogoula were part of the Sangfleuve Confederation, dominated by the Chitiko and the Tiloasha, powerful tribes which had been in existence centuries before the arrival of the Europeans.
French-Canadian missionary priests who visited the Katogoula gave up trying to learn the tribe’s original language, though it was apparently Muskogean in character, superficially akin to Choctaw. U.S. Indian Agent John Sibley, President Jefferson’s friend and appointee, reported in 1808 that he made himself intelligible using Mobilian Jargon, a composite language based on Choctaw, Chickasaw, and loan words from the European tongues. With the Katogoula, as with many other tribes forced to deal with the colonial powers, Mobilian Jargon—more precisely, Mobilian K, an evolving variant—became the accepted language around the middle of the eighteenth century, during the last years of the French regime.
Leaning back with his head wedged in his palms, Nick squandered a few minutes staring at the wall, pondering the ancient helix of chance and determination weaving through the new and strong friendship that had formed between Tommy and his Katogoula tribe, and Chief Claude and the Chitiko-Tiloasha . . .
At length he sat up, shook his head, and flexed his shoulders. Another bout of aimless philosophizing wasn’t getting him anywhere. He forced his attention back to the slanted viewing surface of the microfilm reader.
The Internet was certainly a boon to the modern genealogist; yet, Nick took perverse pleasure in the fact that all the servers in the world couldn’t hold the century upon century of genealogical material contained in courthouses, places of worship, governmental agencies, libraries, attics, basements. . . . The day might come when the world’s genealogical source material would be captured in bytes, but it wasn’t here now. Real genealogy still required the researcher to physically venture into the field for patient spade and brush work, just as any good archaeologist would think it necessary to crawl around on hands and knees in an excavation. In both disciplines, part of the art was knowing where to dig and what to seek.
Hichborn
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