The Start of a Journey

Cole and Pop take father son trips all the time. I think it's their goal to visit every major league ball field in the US. It's good for them. It's a common interest and they bond over it. Mom and I spend a lot of time together just us even if we don't travel just us together, and if we did it would be a drunk road trip hitting wineries all along the way. But Pop and I don't travel much just he and I. So todayPop and I started out our journey to trace our family's heritage backwards on the Trail of Tears to Tuskegee, AL.

We started in Okmulgee, OK, one to update our citizenship roll cards and two to see if their archives would have anymore information for us regarding our family's movement westward. The citizenship cards were easy and painless. But when we got to the library, there wasn't a lot to search through. While the ladies there were helpful, there wasn't much for them to help on beyond finding my great great grandmother and her parents and siblings on the role sheets. So it's back to our drawing board.

The National Park Service has declared the Cherokee Trail of Tears route a national park. This is well and good, however, the family we can trace is Creek(Muscogee) not Cherokee. We know we had family on this route that is well marked, but it is not the particular branch of our tree we want to follow. But we'll take it on our way there allowing for interest spots along the way. I will finally put my history degree to good use while on this trip. We figured out we want to end up in Fort Mitchell, AL to start our way back, since it looks like that's were the government kept its "concentration camp" for tribes right before removal. There is a museum located there dedicated to the Creek Trail of Tears that hopefully can give us more information than what we have come across thus far.

Keep following us as we travel and discover. You never know what we might find.