Documenting Blood Quanta
Recently I received an email from a grandchild of Mary Anna Rich (born 1899). He told me that he was contesting tribal records with regard to his grandmother’s blood quantum, which was officially changed from full-blood to 7/8th sometime after the 1950s. He was requesting my assistance in finding documentation that his grandmother was indeed full-blood Otoe-Missouria, as the daughter of Ben and Julia Mahee Rich. He indicated that Ben and Julia’s other child, Frank Rich, is still listed as full-blood in tribal records.
I doubted that I could provide any documents with sufficient authority to overturn official tribal records. Nevertheless, having been through genealogy research on my own family, I was familiar with the issues, so I decided to see what I could find out about his grandmother.
The first problem is that old records of blood quanta are not always reliable, and the tribe has routinely corrected previous records. My grandfather, Dewey Washington Dailey (1901-1986), was an allottee on the second allotment schedule and was always listed as full-blood up through the 1960s, when the tribe changed his official blood quanta to 7/8th, based on the fact that one of his great-grandparents was white. Dewey’s mother, Belle Robedeaux (1878-1939), was the daughter of Antoine Robedeaux (1847-1903), who was presumably the son of a Frenchman named Robedeaux. It is generally accepted that surnames such as Robedeaux and DeRoin among the Otoe-Missouria and Ioway tribes are the result of this same type of parentage.
Mary “Anna” Rich is enumerated on the 1900 US Census as full-blood, and I’m sure she was considered full-blood by the tribe. With regard to her parentage, the evidence is overwhelming, but circumstantial. Ben and Julia Rich are enumerated on the 1899 and 1900 Tribal censuses as husband and wife, and “Annie” first appears on the 1900 Tribal census as Ben’s 1 yr-old daughter.
Keep in mind that I was not raised on the reservation, so my observations and conclusions are based on academic research without the benefit of personal experience. But it seems to me that the real issue here is that in earlier times, many people who were “considered” full-blood were not actually full-blood. Historically, descendants of half-breed children who were raised within the tribe and married within the tribe, after two or three generations, eventually were culturally “accepted” again as full-blood.
I don’t have any documentation other than family history from others, but I believe Mary Anna Rich’s mother, Julia Mahee (born c.1875), was the daughter of Harry and Laura DeRoin Mahee. Again, Julia is consistently enumerated as a full-blood. However, her mother, Laura DeRoin (born c.1852) was the daughter of John and Rozella DeRoin, who were quite likely not full-bloods. In fact, the list of allottees on the Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation in 1860 includes a Rozella DeRoin and several men named John DeRoin. The fact that they were using familial surnames in the mid-1800s is more evidence that they were not full-bloods. It’s quite possible that both John DeRoin and his wife, Rozella, were the children of white fathers and Otoe-Missouria mothers. If that were the case, it would make Mary Anna Rich, their great-granddaughter, 7/8th Otoe-Missouria.
I don’t know why the tribe would still have Frank Rich listed as full-blood. It may be as simple as the fact that he died without descendants before the tribe became more diligent about blood quanta, so there was no reason to change it.
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