If Your Last Name Is on This Cherokee List Your Family May Be in the Dawes Roll

If your last name is on the Cherokee Freedmen rolls, a federal record from 1902 may name the person who owned your family — and name your great-great-grandmother's mother and father on the same page. It's free to search, and most Black families carrying these surnames have never looked. In this video, Felicia reads the verified surnames that appear on the Dawes Freedmen rolls of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations — from the leadership names like Ross, Vann, Adair, Watie, Colbert, Folsom and LeFlore, to the everyday names like Brown, Johnson, Davis, Smith, Williams and Jones that fill those rolls page after page. You'll learn why a surname is a real lead past the 1870 wall, what a single Freedmen enrollment card reveals (including the "slave of," "father's owner," and "mother's owner" fields found on no other record), and exactly how to search the rolls yourself for free. A name on these rolls is a lead worth four minutes — not proof of ancestry, and often not the enslaver's own name. What it means for tribal citizenship is a separate question that belongs to the nations themselves. This channel is here for the record. 🔎 SEARCH THE ROLLS FREE Oklahoma Historical Society — Dawes Rolls index: https://www.okhistory.org/research/dawes Type your last name, leave everything else blank, and look for the word "Freedmen" in the enrollment/card column. Search all five nations, and search every spelling. #DawesRolls #CherokeeFreedmen #BlackGenealogy #AncestryDNA #BlackHistory #IndianTerritory #FreedmenRolls #FiveCivilizedTribes #FamilyHistory #AfricanAmericanHistory