Hi, cousins, Several people have mentioned that they have family traditions saying some Pennington ancestors were Cherokee or Chickasaw, or some other Native American tribe. This past weekend I was at the GENTECH 2000 conference, and bought a CD version of a large book that has all the names of people who were listed in the "Guion Miller Roll" -- a sort of specialized census of people who had applied for compensation from the government for Cherokee land, based on their stated Cherokee ancestry. It was compiled in 1906-1909. There are a number of Penningtons listed -- over a page worth, at one name per line. By the way, being listed doesn't mean they were necessarily Cherokee, but it does mean they claimed to be Cherokee for the purpose of getting the government money in the lawsuit brought against the government by three groups of Cherokee for money due as a result of the Treaty of New Echota (1835) The information included on the disc is the surname indexed, application number, sex, surname or married name, given name, maiden name, year and place of birth, current place of residence (at the time of the census), city and state and soundex code. The introduction on the disc gives information about the Guion Miller Roll itself and where to obtain microfilms of the original cards used to collect the data. They say these sometimes have extensive genealogical information, so could be worthwhile pursuing. The name of the CD is "Vital Information from the Guion Miller Roll: Eastern Cherokee Court of Claims" Heritage Disc #0878, transcribed by Billy Dubois Edgington & Carol Anne Buswell. It cost $29.95 +tax from Indian Scout Books. It is also available at http://www.heritagebooks.com for $30 + shipping & tax. The CD works on PC or Mac (or UNIX), since the material is in Adobe Acrobat (PDF), and it's fully searchable and printable. A few of the Penningtons listed under that name as the index are: Abel b. 1836 NC Ambrose (no date/place of birth given) Andrew J. b. 1844 NC Asa, b 1872 VA Asa, b. 1853, VA Calaway, b. 1874 VA Calton, b. 1859 VA Celia (m. Kilby) b. 1830 NC Charles Pinedexter, b. 1886 KY Ciceero, b. 1871 VA Claburn b. 1830 NC Columbia (m. Dolinger) b. 1873 VA D. Eli, b. 1874 VA Darcy J. (m. Walls) b. 1868 VA Eady [Blevins] b. 1883 VA Effa M. b. 1901 VA Eli, b. 1840 NC Elic, b. 1874 VA Elijah, b 1864 VA Elizabeth [Hart], b. 1871 NC .... Uriah, b. 1868 VA .... Wells, b. 1883 VA .... (Maiden names are in square brackets [ ].) Cheers, Katherine