Whatever your reason for wanting to trace your Native American ancestry, whether its to become a part of the tribe, or simply to verify that old family story that says you were a direct descendant of a federally recognized Native American tribe, it’s going to start just like any other kind of genealogy. At the beginning.

The beginning of any kind of genealogy means that you’re gong to start with you.
Normally you’re not going to have a vast collection of known facts about your Native American heritage, nor will you have a great many dates, tribes or other factors. It isn’t going to help you a great deal in a case such as this to begin your research in tribal records.

what will be most helpful to you in a case where a great many facts aren’t known is to begin working backwards from yourself, and find out as much as you possibly can about your heritage through your parents and grandparents. Find out ancestral names, seek out birth dates, marriage records or at least marriage names and dates, and at least what state they may have been born in. If you can try to find out approximate dates of death and how old they actually were.

In the beginning your goal will have to be simply to find a tribal link. There will be cases when finding that isn’t at all easy to accomplish and you will have to work from other factors such as the area they lived, and move from there to where they were born, or where you think they were born. Study those locations and compare them to the various tribes that may have lived there and in most cases you can narrow down tribes that they may have an affiliation with.

The US Bureau of Indian Affairs, (BIA) does publish a directory of tribes, which includes over 500 tribes that are currently federally recognized that you can download in a PDF document. You can also access some of this information from a database that is called the Federally Recognized American Indian Tribes, which is put out by the American Indian Heritage Foundation.

After you’ve narrowed things down a bit, you wil probably want to do a bit of light reading, so that you can compare your family history and stories with what is the actuality for those tribes you may be thinking are yours. This will probably help you to get your tribal heritage right, and from there you can move into the National Archives to help you get a few steps further.

A few places where you might find some help in this type research will the National Archives which were created by the BIA and will include tribal census’, school records, claims and allotment records as well as estate records and in some cases military service records.

Some of the most helpful records have been set up in digital format by NARA and include things such as

* Index to the Final Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes
* Index to Applications Submitted for the Eastern Cherokee Roll of 1909 (Guion-Miller Roll)
* Wallace Roll of Cherokee Freedmen in Indian Territory, 1890
* Kern-Clifton Roll of Cherokee Freedmen, January 16, 1867
* 1896 Citizenship Applications

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