Did Bob “the Bench” Benge have a family?

Nope, nope, and nope. “The Bench” often confused with Robert Bench, son of Obediah (both white). No known wife, may be father of the John Benge who led a detachment on the Trail of Tears . No such person as “Tanneh Hop”. Dorcas MNU Benge Duncan (sister of Ga ho ga) was married to an unknown Benge, not “The Bench”, had son Edmond Benge, married second to Charles Duncan, no known connection to Bob Benge. No children of Inoli/Black Fox (the Chief). No”Nancy/Agnes Caldwell.” Only Caldwells I can find were intermarried whites from the late 19th century.

I don't believe anyone is doubting beyond possibility your records of Nancy "Agga's" existence or John The Wagonmaster" either. It is just that we aren't sure "yet" who the actual parents are. The documents don't prove out that Bob "the Bench" had any known children. Don't give up on this Erica Blanton, we are all working to try to sort this out. Kathryn is well versed and has access to records we can only dream of. Let us try to get this figured out.

Robert Benge was a white man, the son of Obediah Martin Benge. He married a Cherokee woman, named Jennie Lowrey. They had eight children: Mary, Eliza, John, Robin, McLemore, Young, Pickens, and Sarah. The son John married a woman named Caroline Gordon. Neither Robert, nor his brother Martin (who married Jennie’s sister Eliza) had a daughter named Nancy.

A different John Benge, possibly the son of the Cherokee Bob “The Bench” Benge, was married to Quatie Conrad and Runafter McLemore. This is the John who led a detachment on the Trail of Tears. He had about ten children, but no daughter named Nancy or Aggie.

The Ancestry trees listing the Cherokee Bob Benge as the father of Nancy Agnes Benge Caldwell are a myth. Bob Benge was murdering white settlers, not fathering their children. These trees are fictional. Nancy may have been the daughter of a man named Benge, but not the Cherokee man.

Excellent, I am a lot clearer on how the family should look, and will work on clean & lock next.

Run After McLemore

According to Jim McLemore in this post, she was married to John The Wagonmaster" Benge, not John "Wagonmaster" Benge

??

https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/mclemore/1147/

There is only one John Benge in this time period, the probable son of Bob “The Bench” Benge, husband of Quatie Conrad and Runafter McLemore. He is the man who led the first Cherokee-led detachment on the Trail of Tears. He had a son also named John, born about 1827. The white Robert Benge and his Cherokee wife Jennie Lowrey had a son named John, born about 1840.

John Riddle Benge Has the wrong nickname - he’s showing as John "Wagonmaster" Riddle Benge. That’s what confused me, his profile notes & tree look correct.

Apparently a letter written by Run After McLemore in 1838 from The Trail of Tears is extant.

https://media.geni.com/p13/e9/c7/09/2c/5344484e21217ff0/6fd0ccf2-32...

I think that’s pretty unlikely. Ganelugi was not “Shawnee Metis” that’s junk from Don Greene. She was a mixed-blood Cherokee.

TMcCormick

I think you’re mixing up the John Benge’s. Jennie Benge Was the mother of John Riddle Benge by ROBERT Benge. This John was much too young to have led a Trail of Tears contingent.

Lettie “Hatchet Gray” Durham was not known Cherokee, if you find the Geni profile you will find discussions attached looking for her origins. Cannot be found at least so far.

Here’s an old discussion for instance:

https://www.ancestry.it/boards/thread.aspx?mv=flat&m=195&p=...

Just a reminder that there are NO RECORDS to support or document these 18th century Cherokee and mixed blood families. If you find actual records (baptisms, land records, wills and the like) for an 18th century person that person was not Cherokee. Missionaries didn’t arrive until 1800. Everything Cherokee before 1821 is extrapolated from statements made by white men and women. People are attempting to turn comments like “Old Tassel was the uncle of ‘Young Tassel/John Watts” into a family tree. “Uncle” in the Cherokee sense can just mean an older man from the mother’s family and clan, not necessarily her brother. Cherokee people lived in extended clan-based families. Most white traders had white wives and families. In order to gain status with the tribe they took Cherokee “wives” for one or at most a few trading seasons and then both parties moved on. Biological fathers were not an important part of a Cherokee child’s life. Women’s names are generally not recorded. Unless the woman lived into the 19th century most of the names you see for pre-Revolutionary Cherokee women are completely made-up. Starr didn’t have any magic set of records to work from, he interviewed people between 1890-1910 and correlated their recollections and family stories into trees. He made generational errors, people confused names, and for the many men and women who had multiple partners it’s often unclear who belonged to whom. Starr was the first person to make any attempt at recording Cherokee genealogies and he did not even try to list many of these early families.

Most early Cherokee have no known modern descendants and those who do exist (the Nancy Ward, Timberlake, and Doublehead families for example) are well-documented. Cherokee people were very well-documented in the 19th and early 20th centuries so finding a Cherokee ancestor is not difficult.

Timberlake is a great example. Ironically we’ve had trouble figuring out which exact European Timberlake family he was from, which is typical of early Virginia confusions. But the Cherokee daughter married in and her descent are clear; they stayed Cherokee.

You have great taste in first names. :)

Private

I keep all my genealogy on Geni, I’m sorry; nor am I directly related. However, Kathie Forbes, who is Cherokee, helped me track down my family Cherokee myth. I have a distant cousin whose descendants claimed was a half brother of Bob “the Bench” Benge. They filed a claim on the Dawes Rolls and were rejected.

Cherokee genealogy for tribal membership purposes (Eastern Band or Nation) is really pretty simple. You find an ancestor on one of the Rolls and prove your descent. It’s also pretty easy to disprove: if you have 19th century ancestors listed on US censuses, they were not Cherokee.

Ken Tankersley has moved on and disavowed his “Redbird” writings. There was a Cherokee man named Redbird who was murdered in Kentucky. There is zero connection between that man and the Brock family. If you are a Brock descendant there is a great Facebook group “Jesse Brock 1751-1843 and siblings” that has all their documentation posted as well as a DNA study. If you would like to message me here on Geni with the line you think may be Cherokee I’ll be happy to take a look. The best method is to build out your tree with actual documentation - censuses, births, death records, marriage records, not from matches, hints, or other trees. Then if you can place an ancestor in a place and at a time when Cherokee people were there you start looking at Cherokee records. Usually that means going back to 1850.

Worked on Erica Blanton's tree some today in an attempt to get her Blanton, Caldwell, Green and others merged and purged to leave you experts to the task of the Benge issue. The "easy" parts of her tree up to that point are as far as I can tell fairly accurate.

Lloyd Alfred Doss, Jr. Thank you ! It’s getting easier to see what Private means now that she’s connected to the Geni World Family tree.

Erica, please tag profiles you are interested in to the discussion, and please don’t re enter (duplicate) them if we already have it. You’re related already now.

Here’s Nancy Agnes “Agga” Caldwell

She’s all white on census reports.

E-no-li Black Fox, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation - we know nothing about his family.

Is there a reference for Nancy Cooper please ?

I say this with respect - it’s probably a good idea if now you stopped entering profiles going further back in time but instead concentrated on sourcing the tree you’ve built.

For example the sources I see have Nancy Blanton (your line) as daughter of William "Billy" Caldwell and his “first” wife Mary “Polly” Caldwell

Do you have a reference (not a tree) that shows differently?

Private It looks like you are getting Agga Caldwell’s Ancestry from the discredited Shawnee Heritage books. Here’s an example of how his work is thought of by Shawnee genealogists:

https://www.ancestry.com/boards/thread.aspx?mv=flat&m=169&p...

And, of course, Bob “the Bench” Benge was Cherokee, and his family is a matter of record.

Agga Caldwell did leave Records, she was enumerated in census reports. As white.

Is this record where the name “Nancy Black” is coming from?

Nancy Black
in the North Carolina, Index to Marriage Bonds, 1741-1868
Name: Nancy Black
Gender: Female
Spouse: William Caldwell
Spouse Gender: Male
Bond date: 22 Sep 1810
Bond #: 000065040
Level Info: North Carolina Marriage Bonds, 1741-1868
ImageNum: 000675
County: Haywood
Record #: 01 014
Bondsman: John Battle
Source Information
Ancestry.com. North Carolina, Index to Marriage Bonds, 1741-1868 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2000.

https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=4802&a...

——

I would think them unrelated?

Thanks for the link above Erica Howton, I read it with remorse as I can relate to the references made to believing in this garbage and my adding hundreds of profiles on Geni based on it only to discover it was about 80% conjecture, myth and "Indian Princess" fairy tale.... Now I have put something out there, on the Internet forever that is baseless in it's text. Guess if nothing else it has made me a better genealogist by shaming me. Slowly trying to fix it.

The link on page three of this forum message has an article link that was outstanding and wish everyone would read it about Native DNA and the explosion of our previous beliefs as to their origins.

"Review of Science Writing and News Reports on DNA Testing and Popular Genetics"

Native Americans Have Deep Ancestry in Europe: Yes, It's Official
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Shocking, Long Overdue Revision to American Indian Genetics

By Donald N. Yates

Going to have to look for this book!

No no no, Donald Yates does bogus genealogy and genetics. He’s tainted the Melungeon studies.

The best I know of for explaining Native American DNA is Roberta Estes.

https://dna-explained.com/native-american-dna-resources/

Donald Yates assembled people who claimed to have Native American ancestors, not enrolled members of tribes, and used their DNA for his “research.” Then, big surprise here, he found that their ancestors were European.

People from all over the world ventured into North America prior to Columbus. The Vikings, for example. The Vikings probably brought mtDNA "X" (as it was originally defined, ca. 2006, as one of "the 5" American Indian maternal haplogroups) to North America.

If your mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's...mother was Indian (or if even a Viking woman who had either voluntarily or otherwise been compelled to assimilate into an unfamiliar tribe) -- you will know who you are, regardless of all the political pressures from 'both sides' of this particularly vexing issue of ethnic identity, which after all is rooted almost entirely in greed.

Politics and prejudice nearly kept me from ever learning the whole truth about who I am, because my mother and grandmother thought it safer to deny (mother, by conveniently 'forgetting' ever to mention it) or at least downplay it (grandmother, who waited until just before she died to finally reveal the precious truth to us).

Somehow I knew all along that we were 'different' in a way that caused me a degree of anxiety and confusion. I was unable to even form the right question for the answer I was seeking. "Something is missing, what is it?" "Why do I feel like I don't quite belong, like I don't really 'fit in' (with society outside of my family and closest friends)?" "What is bothering me?"

I'm fully aware that I have nothing ''material'' to gain from knowing the whole truth about my ethnicity, and that's okay because I'm not greedy. But seeing Grandma's snapshot of my own Cherokee gg-grandmother -- after recovering from the initial shock -- brought me peace of mind and a sense of closure that is '''priceless'''.

So I don't have to prove anything and I really, 'really' don't care who believes me, because that's how I can know who deserves my trust and respect.

The Vikings have nothing to do with the Cherokee. They lived for a brief period at L’Anse aux Meadaux on the northern tip of Newfoundland, more than 2,000 miles and the Gulf of Labrador away from the Cherokee. It’s certainly possible that some Biking men fathered children with members of the local population, but white women certainly weren’t havong babies with Native men. European genes weren’t introduced into The Americas until Col7mbus arrived, and the first contact between and Cherokee and Europeans was in the 1570’s, followed by a gap of 100 years. There were no European women in any of these contacts.

I agree that with all these “famous” lineages, you already know who you are.

It’s chasing back into the “unknown / unrecorded / mis recorded ... etc” where we need to be as careful as can be.