I'm just posting this for anyone related to this branch of the Pearson family. Back in the 1990s, I was told my Pearson great-great-grandmother Sarah Ann 'Annie' Pearson, daughter of this Winlock Pearson was Choctaw. My mother had visited Annie as a child and told me she was 'indian' and my eldest great-aunt Ada McLain told me she was Choctaw. I set about trying to find info, but this was before the internet or DNA, so I called the office of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw hoping they could provide some information. The very nice woman I spoke with on the phone told be, regretfully, that they had very incomplete and sketchy records. So I hit a brick wall on that.
Years later in the early 2000s, I discovered that while I couldn't prove Annie's Native heritage, I discovered her daughter Emily, my maternal great-grandmother had married Hillard McLain of Creek lineage. Then in 2020, my mother shared with me pages of handwritten notes great-aunt Ada had passed on to her many years ago before her death. They were notes on yellow legal pad paper and mentioned that Annie's mother was Elizabeth Grayson. That was the first time I'd had that info. Further research by collaborating with Grayson DNA-matching cousins and using Ancestry ThruLines revealed that Elizabeth Grayson was the daughter of Ambrose Grayson and Sarah Buchanan Vann, Cherokee.
So I concluded that Annie hadn't been Choctaw at all but that she was Cherokee via her mother's lineage and that there was no Native American on her paternal Pearson line. I considered it 'cased closed'. But...then I began to get DNA matching cousins on Ancestry who share Native American DNA with via Winlock Pearson and his sister Barbara (Pearson) Rigdon, both of whom are my direct ancestors. My maternal great-grandmother was Emily Pearson, the illegitimate daughter of Winlock's daughter Annie and her first cousin, a son of Winlock's sister Barbara. So now I was back to wondering who/where/how the Native American was coming in on Annie's paternal side.
Today I got my answer. I was adding a DNA matching cousin on the Pearson lines to my Ancestry tree and when I got to their ancestor Charlie C. Pearson, Ancestry shows a document where he had applied to become a citizen of the Mississippi Choctaw based on his father Winlock claiming to be Choctaw. The application was denied, but that's just denying enrollment, it doesn't negate that they were Choctaw. In fact, applications were denied to people who didn't have an ancestor on the Dawes Rolls or any other of the official rolls and/or didn't meet residential requirements. Our Pearsons would have been denied on both of those criteria.
But, this does explain why I've got DNA matching cousins on Ancestry who I share Indigenous Americas - North DNA with and the common ancestors being Barbara (Pearson) Rigdon and/or her brother Winlock Pearson. Turns out, my family tradition that Annie was Choctaw was right. They just didn't know she was Choctaw on her dad's side and Cherokee on her mother's side.
The Native American in the line seems to come from Barbara and Winlock's mother Therie (Wilson) Pearson who has also been a mystery. For the longest time I didn't have parents for her. Those who try to assign parents to her don't agree on who they were. Again, Ancestry ThruLines and DNA matches have been invaluable.
This year a woman named Aquba from Africa showed up as a possible ancestor for me in ThruLines, connected as Therie (Wilson) Pearson's mother. I blew it off. I don't have any African DNA in my test results and there was no documentation whatsover. But, my son has African DNA, which we had 'assumed' came exclusively from his dad's side. To my surprise, he showed a match to African DNA with a descendant on the Pearson lines. So, I added Aquba to my tree just to see if I began to get DNA matches to her. I now have 140 DNA matching cousins with Aquba as our common ancestor. So, if Therie's mother was from Africa and assumed to have been a slave, she wouldn't be the source of the Native American / Choctaw DNA on the Pearson/Wilson line. It would have to come from Therie's father. Some show him as John Wilson, others show him as David Wilson. I have no proof for who her father actually was, but given how over the decades more and more of this family history continues to unfold, I'm hopeful that one day we'll have information on Therie's father.
The main thing is we know that even if family traditions have errors and information passed down is sketchy and incomplete, DNA doesn't lie. Even if someone applied for Choctaw citizenship and was denied, the fact that their descendants are showing shared Native American DNA traced back to them validates what has been passed down through the generations who had no reason in their day to fraudulently claim to be Native American when my mother has told me that in Mississippi 'back in the day', it was not desirable to be consider Native American and could be dangerous. She said it was better to be Black than Indian when she was growing up. Great-aunt Ada told me she and her siblings were taught to run hide if strangers came up, because the family feared children being taken away to the residential schools. So my half-great-great-uncle Charlie Pearson (he had a different mother than my Annie), broke with the family tradition of not proclaiming their ethnicity to attempting to embrace it.
It is very rewarding after literally decades of gathering bits and pieces of this family puzzle together to continue to have more and more of it validated, thanks to DNA matches and unexpected records on Ancestry and longhand notes from a dear great-aunt. I don't want this information lost again, so I'm putting it here. I only had one maternal cousin who was as interested in all this as I am and, sadly, she passed away earlier this year. I would so very much have loved to have shared this new information with her today.
Debbie Gambrell
Pearson Descendant
