Bert, The Find-A- Grave story for Polly Hooker Rich does not match the Cumberland folklore. Mom was convinced about the Cherokee ancestry. My knowledge is presently based based on John Rich family folklore. The same folklore coming out of Clay Co. Tenn. supports this but the tombstones of the Old Macedonia Cemetery were removed and used as the base for a moonshine still. The Rich/Strong families of Jackson County suggest that Polly Hooker was actually hidden in the nearby Cherokee reservation during the "Trail of Tears" Cherokee nation removal to Oklahoma. Plausible but not evidenced. My son and myself will be getting our DNA testing soon. We should have this native American blood too. Maybe cultural-biogeography will give us the evidence. It's hard to argue against thousands of descendants. Our genealogist cousin, Bill Vincent, PhD believes the DNA should be another analysis tool to help determine the truth.
You'll like this. These early Maryland colonial missionaries rejected the enslavement of local Algonquin speaking Potabaco and Piscataway Indians and abhorred the agricultural reality of slavery economics of the tobacco trade and associated enslavement of negro persons. Father Andrew White and Ignatius church parishioners today receive little credit for their to efforts to treat slaves as indentured granting freeman status to similar to the 7 year service for indentured servitude that paid immigration costs from Europe. Times were very tough and the horrific cannibalism of nearby settlement of Jamestown fresh on the minds of these Catholic immigrants and the plight of settlers on their own in the savage frontier as their generosities were abused then lost as the guest Puritans given sanctuary in Maryland from religious persecution conspired with the English then rebelled to seize power and outlawed Catholicism, corrupting its practices prior to the revolution.
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