I am so glad to finally see that someone, Willard Gentry, did some thorough research on this family and concedes that David Gentry did indeed marry Tiana Rogers....heres part 1. thanks, medicinewoman A. "CHEROKEE DAVID" GENTRY and TIANA ROGERS Who was this David? B. "PREACHER ELIJAH" GENTRY Did he have an Indian wife? by Willard Gentry Abstract Persistent stories of two early Gentry men marrying Indian wives are examined. In the case of David Gentry, the question is one of the identity of David. In the case of Elijah Gentry, the question is whether or not there was a marriage. A. DAVID GENTRY Introduction Cherokee Indian legends tell of Tiana (also known as "Diana" and "Talahina") Rogers, who was famous for having been married briefly to Sam Houston, following his term as Governor of Tennessee and before he became President of the Republic of Texas. These include a statement that she was married first to a David Gentry. To simplify later discussions, we will refer to him here by the nickname, "Cherokee David". We present here a summary of what we have found about David and discuss his possible ancestry. David Gentry's Indian Relationships Any discussion of David Gentry needs to start with the tangled relationships of the family into which he married. For this, following Cherokee matrilineal custom, the family has been described as being descendants of a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth (of the Long Hair Clan) who married Ludovic Grant, a Scotsman, in approximately 1720. A daughter, Mary Grant, was married in the 1740's, to William Emory, an Englishman by birth, who settled among the Indians in the Cherokee Nation East (eventually Tennessee). This and the other relationships below are taken primarily from the compendium of Cherokee genealogy prepared by Emmet Starr, "History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore", and first published in 1921<1>. According to this genealogy, among Mary and William Emory's children were a daughter, Mary Emory (born about 1745), and a daughter, Elizabeth Emory (born about 1748), both one-quarter blood Cherokees. Mary Emory married Ezekial Buffington (some accounts have Mary's sister also marrying Ezekial Buffington, a marriage ended by divorce). Among their children was a daughter, Mary Buffington, estimated to have been born about 1772, who is said by many accounts to have married first (in about 1791), James Daniel. Existing genealogies, including Emmet Starr, are very confusing concerning whether this Mary married second, David Gentry, in about 1803, or whether David's wife was another Mary Buffington, the daughter of Ezekial Buffington and Elizabeth Emory. In any case, this first marriage of David's resulted in three daughters, Elizabeth Gentry (born in about 1806), Isabel Gentry (born in about 1810), and Patience Gentry (born in about 1812). Of these three, Elizabeth has been identified further as marrying Ezekial Williams and having a daughter Mary Williams (born about 1830). Her two sisters are listed by Emmet Starr as "dying without issue". Mary Emory's sister, Elizabeth Emory, is said to have had several husbands (including perhaps as indicated above, Ezekial Buffington). One of these husbands was Robert Due, whom she married in about 1765 and by whom she had a daughter, Jennie Due, born in about 1766. A later husband of Elizabeth was Captain John ("Happy-Jack") Rogers, a well-known operator of a trading post in one of the many Cherokee villages along the Hiwassee River in the Indian Territory of Tennessee. Some time after John's wife Elizabeth died, John married his step-daughter, Jennie. Among the children of this marriage was Tiana Rogers, who is estimated variously as being born between 1796 and 1803. We can assume that during his years of marriage to Mary Buffington, David Gentry was living with the Cherokees at or near the site of the Cherokee village where John Roger's trading post was located. In 1818, Rogers and many of his Cherokee neighbors moved to a new location on the Arkansas River in the vicinity of present-day Dardanelle. This was at the time of the Calhoun Treaty, ceding Indian lands in Tennessee to the United States. Some 6000 Cherokees left Tennessee, moving to new Indian lands set aside for them in Arkansas. It was at this time also that McMinn County was established in the former Indian Territory. David Gentry presumably accompanied the Rogers to his new location. [As an aside comment, Arkansas Territory was formed from Missouri Territory in 1819, and was the new boundary of settler movement, especially after the close of the War of 1812-1814. It is interesting that the sons of Tyre Gentry, described in JGG, vol 2,#11, moved to Clark County, Arkansas Territory, in about 1817.] There is no evidence whatsoever as to what happened to David's first wife, Mary, and their children - whether she died and the children were raised by David or by other family members, or whether David left Mary, or whether David married a second time while still married to his first wife. At any rate, David married Tiana (also "Diana") Rogers, one of the younger daughters of John Rogers and Jennie Due, perhaps a little before or after 1820. [Tiana's name as it appears in the official documents found in the War Department and Bureau of Indian Affairs is spelled both "Diana" and "Dianna" Rogers. Her name among the Cherokee was "Tiana", supposedly because the Cherokees had difficulty pronouncing the "d" in Diana, so we will use it here. The name "Talahina" found on her gravestone seems to have no foundation in fact.] Tiana by all accounts was considerably younger than David, by fifteen to twenty years. It would be interesting to know whether this was a marriage sparked by romance, or was more of a marriage of convenience or family relationships. There is some controversy as to whether David and Tiana had any children, but Emmet Starr and others credit them with two daughters, Gabriel (estimates of birth range from 1820 to 1825) and Joanna (estimates of birth range from 1822 to 1826), both of whom Emmet lists as dying without issue. David is assumed to have lived with Tiana until he was killed in about 1829, supposedly in a border skirmish between Cherokee and Osage Indians, in Oklahoma Territory. In the years just before his death, Ft. Gibson had been built in Oklahoma in 1824 to keep peace between the Cherokee and the Osage, and in 1828, the Cherokee were forced to leave their lands in Arkansas and move to Oklahoma. A graphical representation of the more commonly accepted version of these family relationships is given below. [not shown here-see Journal] One can find variations of the above genealogical summary in various places, which considering the tangled family lines, is not surprising. Emmet Starr's genealogy appears to be the standard used by descendants of these families. As we know from Gentry experience with Richard Gentry's, "The Gentry Family in America", one should not put complete faith in this book by Starr. Undoubtedly some of his information needs modification, and some may be completely in error, if we but knew where the errors lay. We can at least presume that it is a fact that David Gentry married a Mary Buffington, a woman of mixed blood, and then later married another woman of mixed blood, Tiana Rogers. After David's death, Tiana married Sam Houston, whom she had apparently known for a number of years. This marriage, in an Indian ceremony, is said to have taken place about 1830, in spite of the fact that Sam was still married to his first wife. This was during a period in Houston's life after he was elected Governor of Tennessee in 1826 and then resigned the governorship in 1928 and retired in exile to the Cherokee territory in Arkansas. Subsequent to this, a biography of Tiana in "Pitter's Cherokee Trails", comments, "Several years later Houston, being a restless soul, took off to liberate the Republic of Texas. He asked his Cherokee wife to go with him but Tiana wanting to settle down refused to leave [her home in eastern Oklahoma]. Later both Tiana and Houston remarried and in 1838 Tiana Rogers Houston died of pneumonia." Tiana was buried in an unmarked grave, but in 1904 at the urging of her supporters, the remains of Tiana were exhumed from her supposed grave and reburied in the "Officers Circle" at Fort Gibson National Historical Cemetery, Muscogee County, Oklahoma, where her headstone is marked, "Talahina R. wife of Gen Sam Houston" (photos of the gravestone can be seen at several websites relating to the Fort Gibson cemetery). Who was David Gentry? David is described variously as being a "half-breed blacksmith", being a "man of affairs" and as being "of considerable wealth and power". The blacksmith occupation certainly is reasonable. As to being a "man of affairs" or having "considerable power", his relationship to John Rogers alone would have given him considerable influence. [A measure of John's influence is the fact that his son, John Jr., who married a Chefokee woman, became the chief of the Western Cherokee. The statement that David was a half-breed has very little likelihood of being true. It is significant that Emmet Starr makes no mention of this but simply says "David Gentry, a blacksmith, married Tiana Rogers". This story may have originated because David, having married Mary Buffington, became a part of her clan according to Cherokee matrilinear customs. This may have been misunderstood later as indicating David himself was partly Indian. Based on his marriage to Mary Buffington, his date of birth has been estimated as approximately 1780. If David were a half-breed Indian, his father presumably would have been born in the time period of 1750 to 1760, and we must also presume that the father must have moved to Indian territory in the late 1770's when Kentucky and Tennessee first became available for settlement. There he could have met and married an Indian wife and there David would have been born. Such a prospective father of our "Cherokee David" would have had to have been a son of one of the earliest Gentrys who perhaps was looking for excitement and ventured along with traders like Daniel Boone into Indian territory. There is no record of any Gentry doing so, and from all that we know of the Virginia Gentrys of that period in their history, it would be possible but highly unlikely for a heretofore unknown Gentry to be such a father. If David was not part-Indian, we still have difficulty trying to identify possible parents, but there is at least a considerably larger choice. There are still certain parameters that must be met. If David was born in a more settled part of the country rather than in Indian Territory, he could have been the younger of a series of children, and his father could possibly have been born as early as 10 to 15 years before 1750. Even if he was born in Tennessee, for example, his parents would have been married elsewhere and moved there afterwards along with other older children. In addition, David would have appeared in the 1790 census if he were living in a locality where the census was taken. We should also consider both David's name and also the area of Tennessee to which he moved. As to the name David, this was a common one among the descendants of Nicholas-II and especially among the descendants of Samuel-II's son, David-III. Among the known children of the rest of Samuel-II's sons, none include a David. It is not a particularly common name among the descendants of Joseph-II, but there were several Davids in that branch of the family, so we can not rule them out. Considering where westward movements occurred, obviously any of the Gentrys who moved to Kentucky can be eliminated. While John Roger's trading post on the Hiwassee River was far more accessible from South Carolina and Georgia thanVirginia, we cannot rule out Gentrys coming to Sullivan,Washington, and Jefferson Counties, Tennessee, and then travelling down the Tennessee River. With the frequent Indian conflicts, such travel, however, generally involved passing through Indian territory as quickly as possible rather than lingering along the way. From a geographical perspective, the odds of "Cherokee David" being of South Carolina background much outweigh any other source location, since John Roger's trading post was on the travel route for the Cherokees driven from their hunting grounds in South Carolina and Georgia going up to Tennessee where the refugee Cherokees were centered. The movement of later South Carolina Gentrys into McMinn and Rhea counties illustrates the relative ease of access to southern Tennessee. Let us briefly consider all the possibilities for David's parents. In doing so, it will be helpful to refer to previous issues of this Journal (JGG, vol 1, #12, and JGG, vol 2, #1 which discuss the family of Joseph-II), and also the summary of movements of early Gentrys (JGG, vol 2, issue #2, particularly the 1760-1775 and 1775-1790 periods of time). We will divide these possibilities by major branches of the Gentry family to simplify the discussion. continued ===== Medicine Woman's Vision-"Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children."~Ancient Indian Proverb May the warm winds of heaven blow softly on your home, and the Great Spirit bless all who enter there. May your moccasins make happy tracks In many snows and May the Rainbow Always touch your Shoulder~~Cherokee Blessing Researching: Pocohantas>Powhatan>Ashby>DavidGentry>Tiana Rogers>Sam Houston>RollyGentry>Bollings>Strother>Ash __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com