I'd be proud to claim you too Jim. It's just gotten to be one thick brick wall. The best any of us can get is Membrance and his brother Henry J. Helton just showed up in Henry County, Alabama and they said they were full blood Cherokee. I don't think they said that when they arrived. Just waited a number of years. As it turned out, they are on the Creek Rolls as the ancestor a lot of others claimed when registering. They may have taken that surname from someone they knew and probably liked. We just cannot find anything beyond the two brothers. We have their 'Indian' names and I think I located Membrence in Tustenee (or something close to that), with his Indian name on the Guion Miller Roll. Henry J. is my 3xGGrandfather and his son James was the one in the 32nd Alabama.

Since you have your line going as far back as you do, it looks like mine were just hatched without parents so there may not be a connection. It's odd that they were all in a sort of small area and the Helton's mine may have pilfered a name from may have been some of your kin. That area where Tennessee,North Carolina and Alabama meet was close enough they could go to a neighbor and be in another state.

I don't think we will ever get the whole story. One of those at the reunion said they were told they were German. I was looking for information from family and none of them had the same story on the background. Wonder if the 'white lightnin' addled their brains? You had to be there to see what I was dealing with. I don't think most of them ever even cared.
I'm helping a friend look for info on a line of hers and she's having the same problem. I guess we have to understand they may have been 'desperate' enough to assimilate into the white culture to keep from going west and we will never learn the whole thing. It's really like researching the slave lines. Just bits and pieces and a whole lot of questions without answers.
I'm glad you have all of that on yours. It sure makes you feel good when you find those missing links.

Pam