Carole,

I am glad that you found my answers helpful. There are comparatively few people working in Virginia Indian history and fewer still who focus on the particularities of individual tribes.

The record keepers are always the problem, mainly because they didn't keep the sort of information that we'd like to have today. LOL! Still, I would be reluctant to say that they were "not being completely honest about  race." Even as the colony, and later the commonwealth, tried to fix notions of race and create a biracial society of white and non-white, people tended to follow local custom instead of state guidelines. Racial designations for ethnic minorities were so arbitrary that it really depended upon what one white person or another thought constituted a racial/color designation.

In Joshua Rothman's excellent book, _Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861_ (2007), Rothman lists the range of colors descriptors (from dark to light) used in the Richmond Police Guard Day Book (1834-1843). How's this for condemning "race" as an viable designation? The Richmond Police described non-whites' skin color variously as: "Black, very Black, perfectly black, uncommonly black, quite black, slick black, rusty black, low black, real black, nearly black, not quite black, not entirely black, rather light black, smooth and dark but not black, dark though not very black, dark, tolerable dark, not very dark, chocolate, copper, brown copper, Tawney colour not quite black, Tawny, bright mahogany, gingerbread, light gingerbread, dark gingerbread, very dark gingerbread, high gingerbread, rather brown, light brown, Brown, dark Brown, dark Brown (not a mulatto), Brown approaching a mulatto, Brown neither black nor mulatto, between black and mulatto, dark mulatto, rather dark mulatto, brown mulatto, red mulatto, mulatto, bright almost a mulatto, Bright mulatto, pretty bright mulatto, tolerable bright mulatto, very bright mulatto, bright mulatto very white for a slave, dark yellow, Yellow, yellow not mulatto, bright, tolerable bright, light, very light, sallow, coloured, light coloured, half white, two thirds white, nearly white, (p. 204)."

Now, which one of those colors describes your Indian, enslaved, or free colored ancestor?

For your question about interracial marriage possibilities (or casual, consensual, or forced sex, i.e. miscegenation), in the seventeenth century, everyone was fair game. The first anti-miscegenation laws date to 1691, and the first "Black Codes" to 1705. In the eighteenth century, miscegenation may have been frowned upon publicly, but socially, it was largely ignored as impolite to discuss. In the nineteenth century, there was a greater effort to control miscegenation, especially in urban areas like Richmond. In rural areas, it seems to have been overlooked so long as the families were o.k. with the union. Indian men do marry white women; white men do marry Indian women. And in both instances, the men benefitted more. In the twentieth century, the commonwealth and the Bureau of Vital Statistics (i.e., Walter Plecker) became very serious about challenging and ending all miscegenation and separating whites into a rigid racial group and non-whites into a flexible group that included all Virginians who had "any ascertainable degree" of non-white blood (the so-called One-Drop Rule).

More grist for the mill. 

Good luck,

Edward DuBois Ragan, Ph.D.
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318.426.9303

On Nov 17, 2011, at 12:48 PM, Carole D. Bryant wrote:

> 
> Thank you very, very  much, Dr. Ragan ! 
> What you sent is very, very helpful  !  My questions seem to have been so  “
> vexing,” that few offered to tackle them. No, you did NOT muddy the water. 
> It  seems to me that some of the folks doing the record-keeping in the 1800s 
> may have been the cause of much confusion, by not being completely honest 
> about  race. To me, that’s evident upon reading the 1850 census-taker’s 
> options: white,  black, or mulatto. Guess he really scratched his head when he 
> had to enter the  info about an Indian !  
> As you indicated, different counties  may have had different practices, but 
> you’ve zoomed in on Virginia and that’s  what I needed. 
> If I may add another question … What  were the marriage possibilities for 
> Indians in Virginia in the 1800's? Could an  Indian marry a white person, for 
> example? I’ve seen a number of examples of  (apparently) mixed couples who 
> were living in a married relationship and who  stated (in the long ago past) 
> that they were married, yet no records have been  found, not in the 
> Halifax-Pittsylvania area that I’m dealing with, nor in  near-by North Carolina 
> counties. 
> Gratefully,            Carole
> 
> 

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