Lattice (Cole) Hickman - Sources?

Susanne Floyd, I can't help with much else right now (bedtime!), but I have undone the merge. Thanks so much for catching the error and asking for help! I'll look at this tomorrow and see what else I can do.

We should probably put disambiguation notes on both Lucretia Hickman and Lettice Hickman to avoid future errors. One of the issues in this area (or what used to be this area; a lot of disconnections have happened) are due to people being confused over and over, so much that the original underlying profiles get lost in the shuffle. So we'll have to do some work to make sure these mistakes don't happen again. I'll try to get on it tomorrow. Thanks again.

Thanks again, Susanne. We're still showing both women with the same birth and death dates, and they're both still married to William Hickman, so should I assume you're still working, or do you want my help yet? Let me know how to best support you.

Thank you for your hard work on this!

I've MPed Lucretia Hickman and added a link to a transcription of Jacob Strickland's will, so we at least have some kind of document linked in the "About."

I've also MPed Lettice Hickman just to prevent another mis-merge. Which DAR record is showing the BMD info for Lettice? Or is it from one of the lineage books? Let's get it linked in the profile so we don't have more issues in the future. Also, I suggest we delete the FamilySearch tree copy-and-paste from her "About," since her FamilySearch profile no longer reflects those details, and the only source on that profile has the issues I described further upthread.

(Side note: the Letes Cole profile on FamilyTree says to see her father's profile for sources, the father's profile says it got its info from a 2007 RootsWeb page by Jane Gilbert, and the RootsWeb page doesn't exist anymore. Some Googling finds this Jane Gilbert interested in the Coles, but it also leads us to her saying in 2008 that she also was limited in what info she had on them. Looks like this family has confounded people for a long time!)

((And this, of course, also introduces a conflict: Gilbert says the Coles were Irish, while the self-published book Choctaw Heritage says, per this USGenWeb page, that Lettice was Choctaw. I guess we're going to need to track down a copy of the book to find its source for that.))

For William Hickman, of South Carolina, are we still saying he's a son of Isaac and Elizabeth? Our source is this Facebook photo, which is a screenshot of the USGenWeb page. Is that all correct?

Again, thank you so much.

Actually, I should clarify: the wording of Gilbert's message isn't totally clear, but she might just be saying that Letes' mother was Irish (with no sources). Either way, who knows -- we'll have to keep digging. I'm submitting a reference request with the ACPL to see if they can check their copy of Choctaw Heritage for us, and I will be sure to report back of course.

Worth noting that if Letes' father was indeed William Cole, and if he was granted headrights in Orange County, Virginia in 1740 and had a will in Craven County, South Carolina in 1761, all as per Gilbert, it's hard to imagine he was Choctaw. But we'll see.

I'll add Lettice's parents -- thank you kindly for the link!

When I look at the DAR page, I'm not seeing BMDs for Lettice. That's what I'm trying to find. Where are you seeing them there? I'm thinking we're going to have to go through the lineage books...I'll do that next.

Right now, I don't think we have the evidence to support Irish or Native American. I think we have two theories from descendants out there, and we need to find the evidence upon which those theories are based and then evaluate it to see which, if either, is correct.

It looks like the Native American argument for Lettice comes down to 1) autosomal DNA matches, which aren't published and are not reliable that far back in time, and 2) a secondhand report that there's a mention of Lettice being Choctaw in one self-published, out-of-print book that's not available on-line.

I'll report back as soon as I hear from ACPL (not sure what their lag time is right now), but if they say that the info in Choctaw Heritage isn't cited, we're not going to be able to use it unless/until we find something better. But we'll keep fingers crossed that the writer cited their work.

Thanks -- I was doing that, but I hadn't hit one yet that spelled it all out. This one, for someone descending through Joshua, gives some BMD info and the person submitting supporting documents, so I'll cite that one. And since this person cited down the line, I'll also make sure we have the listed descendants.

Just an update that all of the descendants down this line are now fully cited, both with text and the citation tool. I'll try to do some of the others tomorrow.

Good news, bad news:

The good news is that ACPL replied lightning-quick, and they even included a scan of p. 310 of Choctaw Heritage. (Give me a few minutes to put it all in a PDF and upload it.) As a reminder, all claims of Lettice Cole being Choctaw trace back to this book, which was self-published in 1981.

The bad news is that the genealogical library reference staff at ACPL state this: "The only citations on page 310 are for the military service of William Hickman. There is not any citations on the origins of Lettice Cole. The back of the book has citations but nothing for after page 108. I have attached page 310 so you can see it yourself. I would highly recommend not using this book as a source based on the lack of citations throughout."

They also state this: "There is a chapter devoted to Tabitha Hickman (1852-1920), daughter of Samuel Fraser Hickman and Lucy Fille. It does not state how she is connected to William Hickman and Letes Cole. The book is not arranged as a genealogy but rather as a chapter by chapter history. Samuel Fraser Hickman (1815-ca. 1885) and wife Lucy are mentioned in an earlier chapter in connection with the Fille Ma Chubbee Cemetery in Sugarloaf County, Choctaw Nation. It lists the graves in that cemetery, which includes a grave for William A. Hickman (1805-1883), but no mention of Letes/Lettice (etc.)."

So this means a few things:

1. There's a story of Lettice Cole being Choctaw, but we can find no record of that story existing prior to 1981.
2. The earliest mention we have of Lettice Cole being Choctaw has no supporting evidence.
3. The main source we're using for the Hickman is inherently flawed due to lack of citations, and we should not be using it or anything else that relies on it.

This doesn't automatically mean that Lettice couldn't have been Choctaw, but it means we have no proof of it as of now. If we want to preserve her and her line as Choctaw in the Geni tree, we need to find something better.

We also have a bunch of questions we need to ask about Samuel Frazier/Choctaw By Marriage and Paris Frazier and what's been going on with their profiles. I've started a new thread for focusing on that here.

Full notes and page here. (Sorry, trying to have a late lunch!)

Again, just to stress: this doesn't mean Lettice couldn't have been Choctaw. It means this particular book isn't a good source for that info.

Later, I'll try to figure out if there's anything to the Irish theory for her mother.

There were Choctaw notes for Lettice scattered around multiple profiles, some of which were overwritten in "About" revisions. And several websites that have been cited list her as Choctaw, but they all use that book. But honestly, things have been changing so much in the tree that it's hard to keep up with all of it!

Yes, I spent about 90 minutes on Joshua Hickman and his descendants last night, and most that I looked at are still in Mississippi.

Yes, but there's no evidence that Lettice was of *any* Indigenous origin, beyond that one passing mention in a book that we now know gave no evidence for that claim. So unless/until someone finds something, we're not really able to say that she was of any tribal nation.

We have to walk a fine line between not inadvertently erasing Indigenous identity and not erroneously assigning it. Our best bet, in my view, is to say that 1) one researcher said in 1981 that she was Choctaw but gave no sources, 2) one researcher said in 2007 that she was Irish but gave no sources, 3) we have been unable as of yet to find anything about her parents' origin, and 4) some of her descendants married into the Choctaw Nation. All four of those statements are things we can prove. It's a fair compromise, to me.

Actually, self-correction: unless you're seeing something different, I think that with all the cuts and parent changes that have been made, now we're no longer sure that some of Lettice's descendants married into the Choctaw Nation. We still haven't established the connection between Charles/Reason Hickman and his displayed parents, and I think most of the Choctaw claims are through his descendants, not through William and Lettice's proven children.

But at least the mess is getting cleaned up, in no small part thanks to your hard work. We're getting somewhere with it all.