Family Legend and Mystery

Reed Ramey ca. 1890-1966

When I was a little girl, I asked my grandpa (Reed Ramey) what his mother's name was before she married. He said, "Her name was Eliza Miskelley. She was a Indian."

I was a "reader" since before I could remember, and that sounded odd to me. I said something like, "That sounds like an Irish name."

"No," Paw Paw said, "she wasn't Irish. She was a Indian."

When I was in school and the girls (Susan and Patsy) were little, Paw Paw went traveling with a neighbor family, and they went out west. My dad, Gordy Ramey, said that Paw Paw said he was going to see "the Old Man's grave," which Daddy said meant Paw Paw's grandpa. He went to Oklahoma, and brought back a jar full of painted desert sand, which the girls played with.

Geronimo 1829-1909

Both Geronimo and Quanah Parker are buried at Fort Sill Post in Oklahoma. Geronimo was Apache, Quanah was half-Comanche.

When my sister Pat (Ramey) was grown up, she asked Paw Paw's daughter Bobbie Lee who her Indian grandpa was. Bobbie said he was "that old mean Indian that everybody was afraid of," but she said she didn't remember his name. Pat named over several historical Indians, and when she said "Geronimo," Bobbie said that was the one.

Other voices added to the legends: Our cousin Betty Joyce said that her mother, Paw Paw's daughter Beatrice, always said that her grandmother was a Cherokee Indian. Gordy (my dad) said that it sounded like Cherokee, but it was really Chiricahua. Geronimo was born Bedonkohe Apache but later joined and led Chiricahua  Indians.

One of Daddy's cousins, a son of  Uncle Cobb (Paw Paw's brother), said, "We always heard that we were Apache."

A childhood friend of our mother, named Allene H., said that old Mrs. Ramey (Eliza), who was a midwife, just "looked like an old Indian squaw."

There is at least one family picture from the early 1900's showing an unidentified little boy with strings of beads around his neck; some of the beads had Indian designs.

The mystery is that the census records show Eliza Jane Miskelley as a daughter in the household of Lucien Miskelley in South Carolina. Lucien's ancestor was Irish.

The mystery is deepened by the genetic analysis of my son which he received last year, that indicated he was "100% European."

The mystery is further compounded by the fact that our maternal grandfather was part Cherokee or some other eastern American Indian.

So, we have a choice. We can go with the family stories, that my generation is at least one-eighth Apache Indian, with a dab of Cherokee on the other side. Or we can choose to think a slice of us is Irish, which nobody in our family ever suggested, and which was specifically denied by my grandpa Reed.

Personally, I like the Indian blood and hope it flows in me. My blood type, at least, is a positive indication.
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Another mysterious little bit is that if you Google Eliza Jane Miskelley, you get a whole bunch of different people named Eliza or Jane or Eliza Jane, Miskelley, Miskelly, or Misskelly. So whether Great-Grandma was Lucien's daughter or not is questionable.