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Nansemond History and Genealogy
The goal of this project is to develop genealogical and historical knowledge of the Nansemond, indigenous peoples of North America.
Who are the Nansemond?
From Nansemond Indian Nation, official website: history
We, the Nansemond, are the indigenous people of the Nansemond River, a 20-mile long tributary of the James River in Virginia. Our tribe was part of the Tsenacomoco (or Powhatan paramount chiefdom) which was a coalition of approximately 30 Algonquian Indian tribes distributed throughout the northern, southern, and western lands surrounding the Chesapeake Bay. Our people lived in settlements on both sides of the Nansemond River where we fished (with the name “Nansemond” meaning “fishing point“), harvested oysters, hunted, and farmed in fertile soil.
Notable Nansemonds
Indians in Virginia
From Encyclopedia of Virginia contributed by Brendan Wolfe
Indians have lived in the area now known as Virginia for thousands of years. Their histories, ancestral connections, and traditions are intertwined with the 6,000 square miles of Tidewater land the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Virginia called Tsenacomoco. The early inhabitants of Virginia were hunter-gatherers who followed the migratory patterns of animals. Over time, and as the region warmed, they settled into towns along riverbanks and outlined their homelands, developing intimate, balanced relationships with the animals, plants, and geographic formations. They hunted, fished, and farmed, and developed complex social and religious systems and vast trade networks. By the early 1600s, Virginia Indians lived in three broad cultural groups based on the language families found in the area: Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan. Scholars know most about the Algonquian-speaking Indians of Tsenacomoco, who eventually grouped together into a paramount chiefdom. Led by Powhatan, the polity ultimately included twenty-eight to thirty-two small chiefdoms and tribes, stretching from the James to the Potomac rivers and encompassing much of Virginia's coastal plain. In 1607, Englishmen arrived and changed Indian life forever.
After European Contact
From article By Dr. Helen C. Rountree
The Nansemond Indians originally lived along the Nansemond River and we re part of the empire (not a confederacy) ruled by Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas. When the English arrived in Virginia, the tribe had abo ut 300 warriors and a total population of perhaps 1200 people.
The Nansemonds were initially wary and often hostile toward the English, b ut by the 1630's some of them had changed their minds. A family sermon book still in the Chief's possession records the 1638 marriage of John Bas s, and a Nansemond convert to Christianity named Elizabeth. Everyone in the modern Nansemond tribe is descended from that marriage.
The Nansemonds split apart later in the 17th Century. The Christianized Na nsemonds remained on the Nansemond River and became English-style farmers, though they retained their love of hunting and fishing and still call ed themselves "Nansemonds." The other Nansemonds warred with the English in 1644, fled southwest to the Nottoway River, and had a reservation as signed them there by the Virginia colony. By 1744 they had ceased using the reservation and gone to live with the Nottoway Indians on another reser vation nearby; their old reservation was sold in 1792. In 1806 the last surviving Nansemond on the Nottoway Reservation died.
Meanwhile, in the 1720's, the Christianized Nansemonds moved to an area ju st northeast of the Dismal Swamp, where game was more plentiful and English settlers fewer; some of them live there still. But their neighbors were not always tolerant of their Indian ancestry. Several times in the 18th Century Nansemond people had to get certificates from the Norfolk County Clerks stating that they were of Indian and English ancestry and loyal to the English of Virginia. And in the 1830's, when Virginia enacted repressive laws against non-whites, the Nansemonds got their Delegate to have a law passed so that they could be specially certified as Indian descen dants, exempt from the discriminatory laws.
In 1850 the Methodist Church established a mission for the Nansemonds; a c ounty school was added there in the 1890's. That mission is now Indiana United Methodist Church in Bowers Hill, home of an Indian and white congrega tion and meeting place for the modern Nansemond tribe. The late 19th Century Nansemonds joined their non-Indian neighbors in moving away to nearby c ities. When an anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institution made a cens us in 1901, the tribe had about 180 people, more than half of whom liv ed in Norfolk and Portsmouth.
In the 1920's the Nansemonds almost managed to reorganize their tribe than ks to Frank Speck, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania. But in the very repressive atmosphere that existed then for non-white s, the organization did not come off. It was not until the post-Civil Rights Era, when other Indian groups without reservations got formal recogniti on from the Commonwealth of Virginia, that the Nansemonds finally organized and got recognition as a tribe (in 1984). By that time, most of them h ad lived successfully for two or more generations in local cities as "whites with Indian ancestry"; the changeover to being "Indians with white ance stry" has not been hard.
Today the Nansemond Indian Tribal Association (the Nansemond tribe's official name) can be seen as a family as well as an ethnic organization, with members devoted to celebrating and continuing its unique -- and uniquely American -- heritage.
Genealogy
In 1901, Smithsonian anthropologist James Mooney visited the Nansemond in Norfolk County, VA and completed a tribal census that counted 61 households. Some surnames included in the tribe at the time were Bass, Bateman, Bond, Brady, Bright, Cable, Collins, Craigins, Gaylord, Gray, Green, Harmon, Holloway, Howard, Jones, Okay, Osborn, Porter, Price, Rowland, Sawyer, Scott, Sebastian, Simcoe, Weaver, White, Wilkins, and Williams.
From “John Basse, a Story of the New World”
John Basse was born in London, England on September 7, 1616, the third of a dozen children born to Nathaniel and Mary Jordan Basse. Little could anyone know that this well-born English child would be the sole survivor of an enormous massacre in a far-away land, that he would be raised as a member of an Indian tribe, that he would marry an Indian princess, have eight children with her, live to the age of 85, and have countless descendants, many of whom would still tell his story four hundred years later. But he was born in a time of change, and this great adventure was his destiny. ..
Genealogy Links
- “Booke of John Basse, Norfolk County, Virginia AD 1675."
- “Descendants of The Great Dismal”
- “The Nansemond Indian Bass Family of Granville”
- “Re: "Bass Families of the South" Webpage!”
- Free Genealogy » Powhatan Tribes of Virginia » Nansemond Tribe
Resources
- https://nansemond.org
- Wolfe, B. Indians in Virginia. (2015, November 23). In Encyclopedia Virginia. Retrieved from http://www.EncyclopediaVirginia.org/Indians_in_Virginia.
- http://virginiaindianarchive.org
- https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Nansemond_Tribe#start_entry
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nansemond
- Waughman, Sandra F. and Danielle-Moretti-Langholtz, Ph.D. We're Still Here: Contemporary Virginia Indians Tell Their Stories, Richmond, VA: Palari Publishing, 2006 (revised edition)