No, they're not brothers on a TV show, they are all listed as the husband of a Cherokee woman called Nancy, (Nan-ye-hi) [Conrad-2693], in the second half of the 18th century.. Very little is known about this generation of the family. "Nancy's" husband is named in one sentence in Starr's History of the Cherokee Indians, which says: "... married a white trader named Nathan Hicks. Nathan and Nancy Hicks were the parents of Charles, William, and Elizabeth." (p. 599). [Starr confused Nathan Hicks' wife with his son's wife, so it's quite possible her name was not Nancy.] We know a lot about their children (including a fourth child, a daughter Sarah) because the family were among the first converts of the Moravian missionaries and sons Charles and William were both Principal Chiefs of the Cherokee. The parents were apparently dead before the Moravians arrived about 1800 since they are not mentioned in the Moravian records.
What we don't know is who "Nathan HIcks" was. He appears on record in September, 1776 when Nathan,and fifteen other people including his Cherokee wife named "Peg," his son Charles, Walter Scott and his wife and two children [the wife was daughter Sarah], several other white traders, a Cherokee man, and a Cherokee woman were taken prisoner during an American campaign against the Cherokee . (Isenbarger, Dennis L. ed, Native Americans in Early North Carolina, p. 244). So far I have not found out what happened to Nathan and his wife after their capture, although Sarah and her family and Charles all returned to the Cherokee Nation.
None of the three Nathaniel/Nathans is well-sourced. Two claim he is a man born in 1743 who died in Georgia in 1829, but born in two different places with different parents. A recent merge added another Nathaniel and another daughter (a real person, but not connected to Nathaniel by any documentation). Can anyone help sort this out? Are there three different men? Was one of these three the trader to the Cherokee and father of the HIcks children?
