Amanda Almond (abt. 1842)

Ancestors

Descendants

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Biography

Amanda was born about 1842. She is the daughter of Tilman Almond and Delena Killian.

Information below by Joyce Jones Jarvis

Amanda Almon is my 2nd great grandmother. I have been searching for information about her for 20 years. Recently, when Ancestry ThruLines became available, I began to see DNA matches with Almond, Killian, and Lambert descendants. As luck would have it, I connected with a descendant of Lambert who told me there was a legend about Amanda Almon/Almond that had been passed down through the Almond family for years. I immediately began to work on verifying the matches for the various lines of Amanda's ancestors and found that many of them checked out. In order to be sure, I enlisted the help of a 2nd cousin who is also a proven descendant of Amanda and together we verified any matches she had that were different from mine. After confirmation, I am confident that she is my 2nd great grandmother.

Until recently the only information I had about her was the family stories that were passed down by the Ravia family who thought she was an Indian woman. Joseph Ravia, my 2nd great grandfather has quite a story himself which you can read about on his profile. When he applied for an Intermarried Chickasaw Citizenship through marriage with a Chickasaw woman, he gave testimony that he had previously been married to Amanda Almon, a Cherokee but she was now dead. Since he married the Chickasaw woman in 1880 and my great grandmother ran away because of the wedding, Amanda must had died shortly before that time. No actual records have ever been found of Amanda in Indian Territory but records there are almost non-existent during the 1867 (my g-grandmother's birth) and 1880 when Joseph married the Chickasaw.

Questions still remain. Why did Joseph say that Amanda was Cherokee? Was the family she came west with Cherokee? Or was it because she was from Cherokee County, NC and he believed she was Cherokee? Was she dark complected? Joseph was one-half Spanish and had very dark hair and perhaps was on the tanner side. We will probably never know those answers but we do know the family she lived with had to be living close to the Ravia area where Boggy Depot was located. This was a major post during the 1862-1865 Confederacy years. This is very close to current day Atoka, Johnson, OK. We know that Joseph resided here completely from 1875 to 1816 and during the 1860's and early 1870's was back and forth between Boggy Depot and Sherman, Grayson, TX. No grave has been found for Amanda. Had it not been for DNA, we would have never found out anything about Amanda Almon/Almond.

She is found on the 1850 and 1860 census with her parents, Tillman Almond (1824-1901) and Delena Killian (1824-1856) in Cherokee County, North Carolina. If anyone has heard this legend and can add any information, please contact me and tell me anything you have heard. Realizing that not everything in a legend is always true, I would love the chance to get to research it further. I would be very grateful, as would all of Amanda's other descendants.

Sources

1850 Cherokee County, North Carolina census

• 1860 Cherokee County, North Carolina census