Jack. I loved hearing about your family. Thanks for a great story! I know these boards are mostly for research, but to me, it's the history that is the carrot that keeps us going, digging, sharing, staying up late for just one more little search term try, or trying to find that elusive ancestor who has evaded us for years. If we want our children to care about history, we must make it more interesting than it has been the past umpteen decades. I can remember when I was in my high school American History class (a required subject for graduation). It was truly the most boring class I ever had in my life, and it was all I could do to stay awake! And I'm not prone to that by any stretch of the imagineation. When I was in high school (before the earth cooled..)most of them never said anything that was truly motivating or interesting. Never dug into why someone did something they did, or how that action affected everyone else, or history itself. His voice just droned on and on like an overhead fan, and it was hypnotic, but not in the way they would have liked. When I first started doing genealogy about ten or fifteen years ago, I was able to find the basics of both sides of my family, solely from what my mother had verbalized to us as we were growing up, on my first visit to the genealogy library - oral history at its best, if you will. On that first trip, I got into a conversation with the senior citizen volunteer who was manning the desk. When I told her how much I had learned on my very first visit,she told me how she had learned more history doing genealogy than she had when she (get this..) taught it in school!!! My brother could care less about "that heritage stuff", but he sure loves the stories about our family, and the incredible collection of memorabilia from his childhood which I included in a memory book I made him! All stuff our history loving, deceased, mother had kept from our childhood. What I am getting at is that until recently, the history of our lives has not been packaged properly. I am thrilled that it has finally grown into one of the fastest growing hobbies in the world, but it has taken a while! My mother never lived to see it, but the love of history she passed on to us stuck! I only regret that she is not here to experience the journey with me. In the meantime, her great grandchildren have read the civil war letters their GGGG Grandfather Stephen wrote to his family from the battlefields, they know they have a little warwhoop and a little Scots/Irish whiskey in them, and they played a really important part in the history of America. This is what gives them roots. The first time I read my GG Grandfather's war letters, they brought tears to my eyes! They are just amazing! That one little thing has made it all worth it, if nothing else has. I don't like what some of my ancestors did, but, as they say - "you can pick your friends, but not your relatives". There's no such thing as an Indian Princess, but if there was, I would be one. There wasn't, and I'm not, but it sure is fun to speculate. By the way. You have a very cool and ahead of his time ancestor who stuck up for what was right. How awful that evil sometimes wins out over good. When we figure out how to stop that, we'll have the answer to peace in the world..Colonel Benjamin Cleveland did almost the same thing your ancestors did during the Revolutionary period. He was a cousin of my own direct ancestor. Even cut off someone's ears once, and ate his dog when he was starving and in the wilderness. Do I like it, no., yet he was responsible for helping turn the tide of the Revolutionary War at King Mountain. So when it comes to ancestors, we have to take the bad with the good. By the way. My mother was from Pineville, Missouri. Jesse James country, I believe, and her grandfather owned one of the first resorts in the Ozarks..My father was from Craig County, OK. Clanton Country?