To be Cherokee or not to be, & a bank robbery foiled

Happenings of a momentous nature have transpired since last I endeavored to write something for this blog, ostensibly of a family history nature.  Since I am clearly back to it, perhaps that means that healing of sorts is occurring.  My hope & intention when I ventured into this blog, apart from my Ritasjourneys.blogspot.com was two-fold.  

Firstly, I wanted to and still do desire to share the family history that the señor & I have assembled, and this seems a way to impart some of the more personal aspects of not only the history, but of the search process itself.  It has been a labor of love over these years.

Secondly, it is my hope that the generation coming up behind us will use this as a springboard for their own explorations, and most importantly to me - to get to know each other and their elders still on the planet via questions & comments to me and to each other.  Our family connections are of paramount importance to us.

So . . . as I begin to test the waters herein once again after an extended hiatus, I offer two tales that might fall into the family lore category - my theme for the week (with thanks to AmyJohnsonCrow.com for this suggestion/impetus, and for the 51 weeks to follow).

First up is our search for our Cherokee ancestry . . .

In my family, we grew up being told that we had a Cherokee ancestor via my grandfather Zack Kelley, specifically that his grandmother was full Cherokee.  I remember that in discussions, we enjoyed doing some mental figuring about how that translated down to us: Grandpa was one-quarter; Dad was one-eighth and each of us was one-sixteenth Cherokee.

I don’t actually remember Dad talking about it.  Had he told my older brother Frank, who then told us?  These are how the memories fade and/or transform themselves when one is writing about events from 70 years previous.

At any rate, we knew we were part Cherokee and we knew why . . . or thought we did.  Decades later, I become interested enough in my family history to enroll in every genealogy class offered at Yavapai College, eventually doing extensive research by mail, on-site around the country & later via internet for both my family and Chris’, even turning it into a part-time business and researching many other folks’ families and/or finding a few adoptees’ biological families.

When we finally submitted our DNA to ancestry.com, we were “found” by the previously-unknown-to-any-of-us daughter of Chris’ first cousin, but I digress, as usual.

Fast forward to our search for our Cherokee ancestor: hmmm, it wasn’t Zack’s grandmother, after all.  In fact, we learned a great deal about his grandmother - Eliza Amelia (Means) Kelley - and her forebears, and there wasn’t a Cherokee in the midst of them that we could find - and no native American DNA was indicated, either.

We even have in our possession a rudimentary unsigned family tree that lists her as Cherokee.  Are we missing something or is it a case of family lore?  We did discover that Amelia & her husband resided in Cherokee, Texas: could that possibly be whence the story came?  That seems so unlikely to me, but what other explanation?

In fact, Chris & I located James & Amelia Kelley's abode there by trespassing on private property (virtually all of Texas is private and posted).  When we were there in the 1990s, the house walls of rock were still standing - empty and sturdy - but roofless.  It appeared to consist of one room; considering that they had five children, it must have been tight quarters.  Perhaps it had been divided into two rooms.  I remember that we surmised they must have had a kitchen separate from the main house, not unusual for the time & place - 1840s-1870s.

And now about that bank robbery . . .

The Wuehrmann family has a story that I have witnessed morph over time.  I will relate it the best that my recall allows and mention how I’ve seen it waver back & forth with the test of time.

The last time I heard the story told was just last night by Chris; his version coincided in part with my original memory, but at one point, Mom Wuehrmann offered a slightly different take on it.

To begin at the beginning: Grandpa Wuehrmann, Johann Frederich Heinrich (Hans) by name, although he went by Fred, determined at some time in his young adult years to embark with a friend on an around-the-world journey.  That would have been in the very early 20th century.

The pair sailed over the Pacific to Hawaii.  While there, one or both of them ran through his available funds, so they both decided to get jobs.  Fred went to work in a bank, either as a custodian or as a clerk (depending on which version of the story you’re getting).  I know we were told the custodian version early on, but when we mentioned that to Mom after Dad’s passing, she became upset and said he was never a custodian - neither version matters to the tale, however.

The crux of the story is that Fred was present in the bank when a man came in to hold it up.  While the robber was demanding money from the teller, Fred snuck up behind him and clonked him on the head with a heavy object - a marble ashtray or a paperweight, Dad said - and knocked him unconscious, thus foiling the bank robbery.

As an addendum, Grandfather was joined there afterward by his fiancee, Johanna Teresa (Jennie) Dalk, and they married there 6 Sept. 1911, remaining until after the birth of their first child, Agnes Margaret, in 1912, returning to Chicago by 1915.  Evidently, banking was good to him: he eventually became president of a bank in Chicago.