Emmett Starr

History of the Cherokee Indians and their Legends and Folk Lore Emmett Starr

By: Emmett Star, Pub. 1921, reprinted 2021, 676 pages, Index, soft cover, ISBN #9788-1-63914-048-0.

The Cherokees were considered the largest of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, which also included Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. Having been forcibly removed from their Southeastern lands in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee via a treaty in the 1830's to new lands in Oklahoma. As the researcher will already know, there is a great deal of genealogical data on the Cherokees, mostly in the form of census records and enrollment records. The author has included many valuable items of interest concerning the Cherokee's history as a whole, such as: their constitution, treaties with the federal government, land transactions, school system, migration and resettlement to Oklahoma, committees, councils, officials, religion, language, and culture. The genealogist or family history will be delighted to find that half of this book is devoted to hundreds of genealogies and biographies. The biographies are noteworthy for their focus on the genealogical events of birth, marriage, and death over a period of several generations, naming thousands of related individuals in a classic roll-call of family members.