Nana Givens

Note from Curator Pam Wilson: Many Givens descendants believe that Samuel Givens was married to and had children by Nana, the daughter of the noted Choctaw soldier Pushmataha from Mississippi. However, documentation and evidence for this marriage is lacking.

It just doesn't seem logical that a Choctaw woman from Mississippi in the 1790s would somehow marry a Scots-Irish farmer from Mecklenburg County, NC who under oath (in his pension statement) swore that he had lived his entire life in Mecklenburg County, NC except for the time served in the Revolution in SC and Georgia.

It would have to have been an extraordinary journey for Nana Pushmataha to have met him and then left her people to move a thousand miles away to live with him and raise her children in NC. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would have been extraordinary.

It would have been highly unusual even if she were a native woman from western North Carolina, only a few hundred miles away. Generally, when Native women had children with white men at that time, the men came to them and lived among the tribe, not vice versa.

So that's why we are skeptical--that and the terribly skewed and incorrect dates that were on the original profiles for Nana and her children.

I'm leaving her on the tree, but we need to look for better documentation in public records.