I am a direct descendant of Thomas Bailey Christian, a 4g grandfather. I was often told as a child that somewhere in our family tree we had Native American roots. My maternal grandmother knew roughly the generation and believed that it involved a marriage between one of our male ancestors and a Cherokee woman, but beyond that she didn't know the details. In researching our family tree. I had originally placed Thomas as the son of Nathaniel Christian and Jane Ewing (following other trees I'd encountered online), but I've since seen accounts that identify him as one of four orphaned children taken in by Thomas Mastin and his wife Agnes following the murder of Chief Cornstalk, Elinipsico, Red Hawk and Petalla at Fort Randolph in the fall of 1777. I've read that Thomas's Native American name was Kumskaka, but obviously this couldn't be the same Kumskaka who was the brother of Tecumseh. By the same token, one has to raise an eyebrow at the inclusion of Outhowwa Shokka as a child of Elinipsico and Standing Deer, unless they named him after another Outhowwa Shokka. (Reference That Dark and Bloody River, by Allan Eckert, which has Outhowwa Shokka - Yellow Hawk - already married and chief of the village of Chalahgawtha three years prior to the Cornstalk murders.
This all strikes me as a confusing mess that would be challenging to sort out, but that fact that Thomas's middle name is Bailey seems to lend credence to the possibility that he was named in part after Standing Deer and her parents. Not only that, this parentage fits reasonably well contextually with what I was told by my mother and grandmother growing up. Just wondering if the absence of Thomas among the names listed for Standing Deer's immediately family means that you've ruled out this parentage, or perhaps weren't aware of another child.
If it's indeed true that Thomas was the son of Elinipsico and Standing Deer, it's striking (and perhaps a tad ironic) that he should marry Louisa Harman. Louisa was the daughter of my 5g grandfather Mathias Harman, the Long Hunter, who was arguably the most feared by the Native Americans living in the region at that time.
