G2G: Can anyone help in my search for Gantanga Family (Cherokee Indian)

Question

According to family history and a little bit of the internet, I am trying to clarify the following:

Gantanaga (Male) (1710-?) married Jean Jane (Cherokee) (1718-1773) parents to:

Hester Elizabeth Gantanaga (1745-1813), mother to

Esther Gantanaga Black (1769-1835) but the trail goes cold.

Any information on her descendants would be helpful in either confirming the story or debunking it.  Many Thanks!

Answer 1

I would start by looking for documents connected to Esther/Hester Black Thompson.  Her profile here on Wikitree is pretty sketchy.  Lincoln County, North Carolina was not in or near the Cherokee Nation and Soco Creek is in the eastern part of the state, even farther away.

Comments

I've done some additional searching on this family.  It appears that the Cherokee claims come from an application filed by descendant Thomas P. Sawyer for a share of the 1907 Eastern Cherokee payment. Here's a link to the application:  https://www.fold3.com/image/221210737

 The application was rejected as there was no evidence that any of his ancestors had any connection to the Cherokee.  Unfortunately, this application was one of thousands filed by white people who had no Cherokee connection.  The U.S. government approved a payment of 4 million dollars to the Cherokee in 1907.  90,000 people were named in claims to a share of the money, but only 30,000 turned out to actually be Cherokee or descendants of Cherokee.  Guion Miller, the man in charge, did an extraordinary amount of research to determine which claims were valid.  The applications have a wealth of genealogical information, but the claims are false.  Attorneys advertised for clients, had a stable of paid people who made affidavits, and made tons of money off the applicants who of course got nothing.

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This may be disappointing comment to some descendants of Elizabeth Black (of which my wife is one), but Gantanaga or Gantañaga appears in Family Search church records for Uruguay and Peru.  And I found the name mentioned in some administrative records for Bilbao, Spain.  My wife has zero native DNA, but her father has a small sample from Iberian. I have considered the possibility that Elizabeth was descended from Spanish explorers or pirates that may have had an early incursion off the North American coast. There's not a lot of information, for sure.