Sharon, I found this excerpt from an essay on The Old Settlers, at http://members.aol.com/lredtail/oldsettlers.html . Maybe that is where you saw it. "There are many contributing factors to what the degree of blood was recorded as. First being that if they were ½ Cherokee they were not legal able to transact any business without a white guardian appointed over them. Because of this fact a large number of full bloods and those that were ½ Cherokee enrolled as less then half. Another one you will come across is that they are registered as full bloods and you KNOW that they have a white ancestor. In most cases those who were ¾ or more were often classified as full bloods. Another factor is in some cases they did not actually know their degree of blood. If you have looked on the microfilm or received copies of the Dawes enrollment packet you will have probably come across " I guess I am about ¼ Cherokee " or similar remarks in there. This was what the Dawes Commission would use as a basis for Degree of Blood. The last factor is that there were different people calculating the degrees of Blood sometimes not very accurately. It is not unusual to find 1 brother listed as 3/32 and the rest of his siblings listed as 1/16 etc. Very often I have seen a lot of you throw out very valuable information because the blood degree doesnt match. If you have any suspicions at all GET THE CENSUS CARD." The best example I know of the disparity we often find between siblings' recorded degree of blood comes from the FIELDS family. So far as I have been able to figure out, James Sanford FIELDS was 5/32 Cherokee. His wife, Charlotte (Stover) FIELDS was 1/16 Cherokee. Their children, therefore, were 7/64 Cherokee. Yet, this is how their children's degree of blood is recorded on the Dawes Roll: Moses O. FIELDS 1/16 Nannie L. (Fields) HATFIELD 1/32 Carrie L (Fields) WASHBOURNE 1/4 Laura A. (Fields) DENBO 1/8 Robert W. FIELDS 3/8 Maude F. (Fields) BURTON 1/8 To make it even more ludicrous, Carrie and Nannie were twins! So if you are researching degree of blood for tribal purposes, you need look no further than the Dawes Roll, but don't rely on it for any other degree of blood computation. Jim Granger >Another interesting point I have heard about is that if you claimed 1/2 or >more Blood, you were required to be attached to an "agent" who would conduct >business (supposedly) on your account. You could not buy or sell land etc. >without the assigned "agent" Perhaps Jerri could comment on this. I don't >remember if this is something my Great Grandmother told me or if it's >something I ran across on the Net. >Sharon Holt Byers