Nicka Sewell-Smith: 0:00

You know anybody who's doing genealogy and is like, really into it. We love puzzles, we love trying to figure things out, and some of the puzzles are more longstanding and take years to figure out. Some of them. You get answers immediately. So that's just the give or take of this. You know, and whatever you pour into it, you're going to get it back at some point. You just don't know when you are.

Crista Cowan: 0:24

Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America Tales of immigration, migration, courage and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us. So join me for season two as we discover, from Sea to Shining Sea, the stories that live in us. We are five episodes into our America 250 series, which means it is time for the state of Oklahoma Now.

Crista Cowan: 1:14

I have a lot of family ties to the state of Oklahoma, but so does one of my cousins. She is a three-peat here on the podcast, but when I think about Oklahoma, I think about Nicka Sewell-Smith. Now, if you listen to episode 34, you know she tells the story of her connection to the Cherokee Nation, but today she's going to learn about some other connections she has to the state of Oklahoma. Enjoy my conversation with Nika Sewell-Smith. Well, I'm so glad you're back. Three.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 1:50

Pete, listen, we're like the Lakers here. I love it. I love it.

Crista Cowan: 1:54

Okay, well, today's story is personal for both of us. I'm really excited to share this. But before we dive into that, you talk a lot about the Rogers family when you speak and teach and in the research that you do, and this is a story tangentially connected to that. So, on your dad's mother's side of the family tree, the Rogers are her father's side, correct, correct, okay? But you don't talk a lot about her mother, your grandmother's mother. So you knew your grandmother, yes, yes, and did she tell you stories about her mom?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 2:28

You know what? It's interesting because my dad's mom, she was almost like an orphan a little bit. So by the time my father was born, both of my grandmother's parents had died and my grandmother had my dad at 18. So she was super young. So like any stories that we have about either of my great grandparents, they're coming kind of like you know, like a long time ago. I mean, you have to remember, my grandmother was born in 1919. So this meant both of her parents were they were dead before the 1940, like they were gone and in essence my grandmother's oldest sister really kind of stepped up as like a matriarch in the family and she was the one that was like the keeper of the family history, like that was like her thing. And so stories I have.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 3:14

I actually have a recipe from my great grandmother that was in the Los Angeles Times, actually found it on newspaperscom and it was for bread pudding and my grandmother had submitted it for this recipe contest and was talking about how her mother made it. So it was one of those things that like got passed down through the generations and so me and my niece are supposed to make it. We haven't made it yet, but I remember finding that going. Wow, like this is a piece of my grandmother's mom that I that I didn't know that she retained after all that time, my grandmother's mom that I didn't know that she retained after all that time. So I have pictures of her. It's really strange. A lot of us look like her and we look like her mom. But you know the scowl. There's a scowl we all kind of have totally get it from her.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 3:57

But she was a super interesting person. I mean you know you have her husband being the one who got citizenship in the Cherokee Nation and getting a land allotment and that's how you know, me and my family derive our citizenship. But she got rejected and her mother got rejected, even though her mother and her grandparents were Cherokee Freedmen. They were enslaved by people in the Cherokee Nation. All these people had Dawes applications.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 4:22

But you know, a lot of times when people read those they get discouraged if a family member gets rejected, not realizing that's a ton of paper. So when I'm looking through my great grandmother's Dawes application, I have interviews with her mother where they're asking her questions directly about her life. I have a birth record for my great grandmother, who was born in the 1870s, for my great-grandmother who's born in the 1870s. I have accounts from relatives and neighbors and all this kind of incredible firsthand accounts that I don't have like on other branches of my family. I get this on this particular site. So I often, especially when I read through the Dawes application of my great-great-grandmother for my great-grandmother, I often just kind of visualize like them sitting and being, you know, interviewed by the Dawes Commission, and the fact that I have pictures of both of them, so I can kind of visually see them, you know, see them talking and answering all the questions which were kind of a little bit ridiculous.

Crista Cowan: 5:21

I love that. Well, I have your family tree here, because I wanted to make sure I got information correct.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 5:26

Right, we are here for the accuracy.

Crista Cowan: 5:28

So your paternal grandmother's mom's name was Clara Bonetta Allen, and is that like what? When they refer to her, what did they call her? Grandma Clara. Okay, and then her mother was Sarah Bean, and you have all this information that you have inherited and discovered about these two women, but what did you know about Grandma Clara's father?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 5:52

So this part of the story. This is why I talked about the cockamamie questions in the Dawes application. So Dawes' process was pretty much like three parts. You had a card that would have information like name, age, gender, whether the person was on a previous Cherokee role, if they were enslaved, who their slaveholder was, and then for freedmen they would record the name, district and slaveholder of the parent of the person who was applying. So let's say you had three generations on a card. You had information for a lot of people.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 6:25

So I pulled my great grandmother's card and I start going through the application and she didn't get to the land allotment stage, which is the third stage. It stopped at the application because she got rejected. But they were asking her mom all these cockamamie questions like was he white? And I was like what? And they're like, well, you guys were married. And I'm like why are they? Like this is about whether or not they were turned back to the Indian territory in time enough for them to qualify for citizenship. Why are we having this whole conversation around, like whether or not she was with a white man and had a child by a white man? So like we knew in my family that my, that my great-grandmother's father was supposed to be white. No one well, actually I can't say no one knew his name because Aunt Edna, my grandmother's oldest sister, who was the matriarch that I just talked about, she wrote this like hilarious, like four page account of the family history where she was like tongue in cheek, like mocking people going to the library to go and research their family history after Roots came out and she was like I'm going to tell you about our family story. So she types it out and she lists his name is like JW Allen, like she says that. So she knew the name of her grandfather and we knew he was white, but like, beyond that, like it's a common name.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 7:42

I remember looking for it for years, like I don't know where to look. But that Dawes application was so important because it was establishing a timeline. Like my great-great-grandmother, sarah, she talked about them living in Joplin, missouri, and how my great-grandmother was born in Fort Scott, kansas, and so I had a timeline the number of children they had, what their names were when they separated. So that really helped me drill down exactly where to look, because it's one thing to have a man named John Allen and that's so common, and then I could go based off of birth locations on the census. But Missouri is a big state, which one is mine. So the Dawes application it really helped me drill down and by doing that that's how I found the marriage license and I was like so they really were married and this is in the 1870s in Oklahoma, territory Well Kansas.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 8:37

Yeah, so like, but still like at that time that's a little like unheard of, um and and a lot of the people who were being interviewed they were confirming no, he was white, he's a doctor, like they were saying that and I was like, ok, nobody passed that part of the story down at all, but I just I knew this was the right guy. I found them on the census. Then there were like some younger kids that had a different last name and I remember my dad talking about Uncle Claude, who was my great-grandmother's brother, and that's the whole reason why our family ended up in Los Angeles. So my grandparents met on the south side of Chicago, actually more actually downtown, because my grandmother used to work at Linton's, which was a department store, and my grandfather came in there and saw her and like, totally was like enamored with store. And my grandfather came in there and saw her and like, totally was like enamored with her and so they started dating and at the time my great aunt, edna, was still living in Chicago. Well, her husband died.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 9:34

I found out he was actually murdered after like a dice or card game. Found that in the newspaper, on newspaperscom. This is the most like murder, mayhem and miscellaneous. It's this side of the family. So my Aunt, edna, she decides to move to California because Uncle Claude passed away and he didn't have any children and he left his house to my aunt. So my aunt left Chicago. My grandmother, in little sister fashion, she follows her sister, and then that's how my family ends up in California. And so Uncle Claude was uh, well, he was at one point a shepherd, but he was an Allen too. So it was like, well, who was the dad? Like what's going on?

Crista Cowan: 10:12

like I still haven't really reconciled that, because he doesn't have any kids so you knew that they were half siblings, but they had the same last name right, but it's like but I still don't know, because Uncle Claude looked just like my great-grandmother.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 10:22

So I think that that's yeah. I think that John Allen was his dad too. I honestly think that. But there were other children. My great-grandmother was the only girl. And then Sarah, great-great-grandmother Sarah. She ends up getting remarried to a man with the last name Star. It's so funny, her maiden name was Bean and then she marries a star. It's a lot of nouns. And so she dies in the Indian territory. She comes back, she dies there, but it's like that marriage license.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 10:53

And then it was just like, ok, who's this guy? And like what's to his story? Like he's a doctor, the people were talking about that, talking about them living in Joplin and him running a medical practice, and I'm like and this was just kosher here Like what was happening, because at the time, like race relations were like a lot, especially when you're talking about Kansas, right, kansas was bleeding Kansas Like there was a pro slavery faction and a pro-emancipation you know faction and they were fighting like tooth and nail. So to have my family kind of in the middle of all of this is just, it was an interesting story. So it was like we knew more and we had photos of Sarah. But John, yeah him, it was not like that. So naturally I start going online, find them together and then our DNA matches start popping up.

Crista Cowan: 11:40

Okay, so this is where the story gets so good for me, right? We're going to kind of pause for just a minute of that piece of the story and we're going to come at this from a totally. For several years, you and I had kind of become genealogy colleagues in that space and then in 2012, of course, ancestry introduced Ancestry DNA, and you, like me, immediately jumped on testing all the people in your family, and I don't know exactly when it was, but I do remember at some point looking at my mom's DNA match list and seeing you listed there as a DNA match.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 12:30

Right At first I was like maybe this another Crista Cowan another , like I remember saying. I was like no, this is Crista. And I remember I messaged you like hey, so looks like we're cousins. And I think I think I might have said like hey, you're going to be there, like let's just like meet up and like we actually like literally have a video of the two of us like in person, like talking about us being related, like right after we found out that yeah, and that was so exciting for me because back then we didn't have nearly the tools we have now, right, and so we didn't always know like which side of the family it was or who the shared matches were.

Crista Cowan: 13:04

And it wasn't a lot of shared DNA, it was so little, in fact, that you and I are not DNA matched no, we're not, so I didn't inherit that bit from my mom, and yet we were determined to figure it out and the fact that I knew we were both proficient enough at family history that we could do that was really exciting for me.

Crista Cowan: 13:23

But of course, my mom's family is all from the South and I know that she has slaveholders in her family tree, and so my initial immediate assumption was that our connection was going to be through slavery and I, like it wasn't that I was hesitant to confront that, but I hadn't to that point in my family history. Research really looked into the lives of the people that my family had enslaved, had acknowledged that they were enslavers but hadn't documented anybody that they had enslaved, and so this was, I think, probably the impetus for me to start doing that was just the simple fact that you popped up as a DNA match to me, and all of a sudden I realized that maybe I had an obligation or some kind of a, and duty sounds like such a heavy word, but like I wanted to make sure that I did that, and so I think the thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is the amount of time that sometimes these things take Right, because you and I both worked on it from our separate directions for almost three years.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 14:29

Right, it took. Yeah, it took a while because, again, we were in the Stone Age from 2013, 2014, 2015. We didn't even have labeling, didn't reflect color coding. We didn't have any of that, we just had. Here's your match list. Okay, work, you know like that was it.

Crista Cowan: 14:45

Root forks, right. But you had figured out, I think based on some of the information you had, that it was probably a connection through your great grandma, clara, and I had figured out through me, through my family, that it was on my mom's mom's mom's side of the family tree, and so I happened to know a lot about that Shipman family. I had researched several generations of their descendants and I had little pieces of information and with you and I both coming at it from our separate directions, we finally were able to meet in the middle and kind of connect the dots that it was this Shipman family, and so I'm going to just kind of share it again. I pulled it up on my phone so that I could make sure I got it correct. But our common ancestor ancestors are a couple named Daniel Shipman and Elizabeth Burleson, and Daniel Shipman is my six times great grandfather and I think he might be your six times great grandfather as well.

Crista Cowan: 15:44

Six or fifth.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 15:45

Okay, one of the two.

Crista Cowan: 15:46

So that if it's sixth for both of us, that makes us seven of the cousins which I love.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 15:51

Okay, that's my favorite number.

Crista Cowan: 15:54

There you go. And Daniel and Elizabeth, you don't know anything about them.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 15:59

We don't know anything about them. Like still, like it's because John Allen took on a whole other like he is the subject, like probably of like a live webinar session. Because once I found him I discovered he married after he married my great-great-grandmother and that there were children from that and then he ended up dying and those kids almost got orphaned. So they didn't really know very much about the family. So, by just irony, here I was the descendant of the first wife of the black wife telling the descendants of the white wife about their family and people were skeptical, like they were. Like I'll never forget.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 16:41

Actually there was a match I reached out to initially and I knew I was related to this guy this way and he was like there's no way we're related and I was like really, you spit in two, I spit in two. We sent it off to people we did not know and then they just said you, you know what we're going to make them related. That's not how this works. And so like I backed off. But more cousins kept popping up and it was a trip, like the whole separation were really when he he unfortunately he had mental illness and it was all over the newspaper.

Crista Cowan: 17:11

John.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 17:12

Allen. John Allen did yeah, he, it was in the newspaper him getting committed to to the mental hospital. It was like he was having mental breaks. So yeah, he, he eventually ends up dying. But the irony is that they sent him to the same county that my great grandmother was living in. He died at the state mental hospital in Veneta, oklahoma, near his daughter, near his daughter. So I wonder, did she know that her father was there? Did she go to visit him, like I would imagine? Maybe because my dad and his first cousins knew the man's name? So I don't know, I don't know, she might have.

Crista Cowan: 17:50

Yeah, that's interesting to think, like when you're a child from a first marriage back in that day did how much you know? Now parents split custody and there's visitation, and like none of that existed back then. And so, yeah, did they maintain a relationship or not is an interesting question. Right, right, yeah. So John Allen is the son of a man named Albert Allen and a woman named Fenetta. Lee Fenetta is the daughter of Daniel Lee and Hannah Francisco.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 18:17

That's such a Francisco.

Crista Cowan: 18:19

That's fun to say. The family shortened the name to Cisco in some of the branches of that family tree. The interesting thing about John's maternal grandparents is that they were first cousins to each other, and they are both grandchildren of Daniel Shipman and Elizabeth Burleson. And I descend from another child of theirs, jacob, and so, like I mentioned, I have done a lot of research on this particular branch of the family, and so I would love to share the story of Daniel and Elizabeth with you, because I think it's so interesting.

Crista Cowan: 18:51

Daniel was born in Germany, and the suspicion is that the original family name was Schuffman, like a German version. His mother had two sons, and then she and her husband and their two sons set off for Wales from Germany. So they immigrated from Germany to Wales, and we don't know at which point you know, we don't know exactly at what point her husband died, we don't even aren't even certain of his first name but while she was in Wales she remarried a man with the last name of Gage, and they decided to immigrate to the United States, and so they came, like a lot of those early immigrants, to North Carolina and ended up settling there, and so Daniel has a lot of younger half-siblings With the last name, Gage.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 19:34

Okay, so I've seen in my DNA matches. That's why when you said it, it was like ding, Like a light bulb went off, right got it.

Crista Cowan: 19:43

Elizabeth. She was born in Virginia and ended up in North Carolina, but her parents were. Her father was an immigrant from Wales and her mother was an immigrant from England.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 19:52

That makes sense, my percentage is right.

Crista Cowan: 19:56

So I'm also curious if Daniel's mother and stepfather knew Elizabeth's father, like if they were connected somehow, because Wales is not a big place and I don't know exactly where in Wales Daniel's parents lived before they immigrated, but I do know where in Wales Elizabeth's family is from and so you know, did they come to this place because they knew him from there? Like it's always fascinating to me, like when you start looking at the networks of connections right, and how people make decisions to immigrate or migrate to specific places, there's usually something that pulls them there. There's usually groups of people who come together. So that's always super fascinating to me.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 20:40

Daniel fought in the Revolutionary War, so if you weren't already a DAR, this is the line I was going to try to do that with, but it was funky, like I couldn't find it was the Albert to John. There was a you know, like I needed that document that said this is the dad and I was having the hardest time and like, luckily, like my state person was like wait a minute, your family's from Oklahoma, like it might be easier to go this way, right, and so that's what we did. So my initial, my initial app was through this line Okay, well, there you go.

Crista Cowan: 21:12

Okay, well, there you go In both North Carolina and then, I think, they end up in Kentucky, warren County, kentucky, over the course of how many years? Their oldest child was born in 1740. Their youngest child was born in 1756. So they have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine children in 16 years. You are a descendant of two of them.

Crista Cowan: 21:37

I'm a descendant of another one, and then Elizabeth passes and John remarries a much younger woman and has two more children in his old age. As a matter of fact, his other two children with his next wife are 30 years younger than his youngest child from his first marriage. Oh boy, right. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. Are 30 years younger than his youngest child from his first marriage. Oh boy, right, yeah, it's kind of crazy, but from these nine children of Daniel and Elizabeth, so far I have uncovered, based on DNA matches and lots of other things, about 7,600 descendants which is kind of crazy and you start looking at the patterns of this family and where they end up and what they do in helping, you know, to build the country.

Crista Cowan: 22:23

It's kind of fascinating. There's lots of stories in there, but for me the best story that came out of it is that you and I are related. Like it's our own little declaration descendant right? Yeah, super fun. Our own little declaration to send it? Right? Yeah, super fun. Um, and so when once you and I figured out this connection, we were able to kind of put because I didn't have john allen in my tree because he went missing from the family, right, I knew, you know, I knew about his mother and I had um, I kind of thought her husband's name was albert allen, but I wasn't 100 sure. Uh, but then when you came at it from the other direction, those puzzle pieces kind of locked into place and now we have this whole other branch of the family tree because of that DNA connection and because we were willing to figure that out.

Crista Cowan: 23:06

So, I love that, me too, so fun. Okay, well, as you mentioned that, you've gone through your DNA matches and you keep finding names you recognize from this the Siscos or Franciscos, the Gages, the Shipmans, the Allens, like there's so many people in this family. You know how do you like approach that? Are you always, when you're working with your DNA matches, trying to solve a specific problem or are you just trying to figure out who they are and how they fit?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 23:35

I would say it's both Like I think especially if someone reaches out first and they're eager, like hey, I'm looking at this thing and it may be a part of my tree that like I haven't looked at in a while, usually it like calls me to come back. And then the other thing too is like I'm like you know what I really got to figure this out. So it's kind of that revisiting, like going back and just looking over and over and over again at the same stuff we've been looking at, you know, maybe seeing if there's new records or collections that are out that might help answer like the question. I mean I like it for both. You know anybody who's doing genealogy and is like really into it. We love puzzles, we love trying to figure things out, and some of the puzzles are more longstanding and take years to figure out. Some of them you get answers immediately. So that's just the give or take of this, you know, and whatever you pour into it, you're going to get it back at some point. You just don't know when you are.

Crista Cowan: 24:28

Yeah, yeah, well said, very well said. I love that, well love this story right Now. I'm super excited that I know more about great grandma Clara. That's always super fun. Um, and as we look at this, john, you said John died in a mental hospital. Yeah, and in the same county where great grandma Clara was living.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 24:50

Yeah, where and where my grandmother was born wow um, I want to say it was within a month of my grandmother's birth. It was close to it because it was it was in 1919. And I was like is that the right person? And I ordered the death certificate and I was like it's the right guy.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 25:07

Yeah, and you know, and then our family kind of ended up where, like, some of my great grandmother's younger siblings were in like Washington State and like California and some of them stayed in Oklahoma, or siblings were in like Washington state and like California and some of them stayed in Oklahoma, or they were in Kansas or Missouri. And so we were like spread all over the place and you know, it's just, it's been crazy, like tracing everyone and like looking up their lives and what they were doing and like, and so you know, I mean that's the thing too, especially when you're engaging with people like and they don't know what, they don't really know the heart of what you want to get out of it. And so that person may have thought, like these salacious things you know, potentially salacious things might were like the, the. That was the story. But the story was not that. It was just a very dimensional man and had he struggled with things and the fact that it was very public, you know, and that his descendants are going through the newspaper, like finding some of this stuff, like for some people who compete, you know completely that might be genetic, that no one knew, that they couldn't attribute, and so there's so many different ways of like looking at it.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 26:18

But, like, for me, I feel like what I've gained from it is the ability to like tell my family like, yes, this oral history we had about this guy being this white guy is right, but also like he was a multidimensional man, you know, one of the things I really wanted to dig into more is just like what did he practice for medicine, you know, and like what was that? Where did he go to school? Where was he educated? Like I mean, you know, that's the only ancestor I have that has a profession like that, that I know. So I've been thinking about that. And then also just with family members, it's great, like when someone new pops up and they're just like you know, oh, okay, this part of the tree is already built out.

Crista Cowan: 26:59

You know, we don't have to try to sit and figure it out so Well. And there's also something interesting that you mentioned earlier about the interracial marriage. Yes, in that time, in that place, I have records that show that most of his family was still pretty much in that vicinity. Yes, my great grandmother and her family all lived in the northwest corner of Arkansas, which is right there, right there, right. And like, who knew, who didn't know, who was supportive, who was not only not supportive but maybe antagonistic about that Right, and did any of that have any effect on the fact that their marriage eventually failed? Or was that because of his mental health issues? Right, his mental health issues, or like there's just. That's one of the things that I love about family history is the stories that we find, but then also the questions that still need answering.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 27:42

Because that's the thing, every discovery leads to another question. Like we keep thinking, oh, it's gonna solve the world, and it's like, no, this is gonna lead to another question. And that's because we're all curious, like that's, that's what got us here. Is is, is our curiosity and yeah, I often wonder, like, how their families reacted to it. And you know, again, a lot of times, when people you know share DNA on this side, they are, they are a little fearful or scared that that the connection is enslavement. I'm like, oh, no, not on this side. You know what I mean. There's, there's other possibilities, and so that's the other part we have to. We have to leave ourselves open for like different interpretations or, um, like different scenarios than what we initially think of, because I walked into it like that too, and so I was like, actually, it's not that, like, this is a very clear path. So, um, yeah, there's, there's a lot of terrain out there and we think we know, based on our 21st century, I like thought, but we don't always know.

Crista Cowan: 28:42

Yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. And it's interesting because I think, because I thought it was going to be a relationship between you and I and enslavement, I was looking further back than I needed to and I was looking like further afield than I needed to when the information about John's family I already had it in my tree but I was trying to like find something different because I had that preconceived notion and when I kind of let that go and just let the records and the DNA tell the story for me and lead me, then the connection was made, which I love.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 29:16

Yeah, sometimes we shoehorn in genealogy, you know, we're like trying to force a thing. You know, there's a lady that I was in a genealogy society with and I often think about her. She had this binder and she had her stuff all in, you know, and she was trying to validate this story. Like that was the only thing she cared about. The whole rest of the tree it did not matter. She was trying to validate that this man was her ancestor. That was it.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 29:40

So every meeting she came to, that was her sole focus and she would not move and all the evidence was telling her it's not him. But she refused to listen because she was shoehorning just everything in. And I often think about that from the vantage point of like, what am I trying to do that with? Like, what am I trying to to to make into something that it, that it isn't, and what happens when I let go and when I take my hands off of it and say you know what? Let me just see where the evidence leads me as opposed to, it's gotta be this, you know, and, yeah, I, I don't want to be the lady with the binder.

Crista Cowan: 30:16

Well, there are plenty of interesting stories without us having to force them Right. Well, as you think about great-grandma Clara and John and what you've learned about him so far and our connection and how that all came about, what is it like, just in that context, that you hope for the future?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 30:33

context that you hope for the future. I think there are so many more stories like this and people just don't know because they again, like both of us, walk in with like preconceived notions. And I think, as records become more available, as varied stories get told, as people hear us talking about this, they may be more open to what's a possibility, as opposed to just assuming that it's one thing rather than something else.

Crista Cowan: 30:57

So your grandmother, that you knew she was born in Oklahoma. Now, because of this research and this story, you've discovered that her grandfather, john Allen, died in Oklahoma right around that same time. As you think about the state of Oklahoma like, what does that you know mean to you and your family history?

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 31:17

Well, for me it's a central part of it, like there is there kind of is not me without Oklahoma. For me, when I go, like I have to stop by the train station that my ancestor died at. I have to go there every time. I have to kind of set my feet there and I might be in Tulsa for the majority of the trip, but like I have to go to Veneta, I have to go to Muskogee, I have to go to all these places that I remember them going to and and hearing about, and reading about and all of that. And in the extreme northern portion of the Cherokee Nation, like almost to Kansas, like I feel like I have to go to those places just a way to commune with them.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 32:01

And often I will go to my great-grandparents' land allotment. I'll go there and I'll go next to the creek that was by the house that my uncle talked about him being a child, and I remember the first time I went there, I went and I took a video and I, you know, posted it in the cousin's chat and my one cousin that's when she told me she's like oh my gosh, papa Daddy used to talk about that creek all the time and how, whenever he would go back home he'd always have to go to the creek. And I didn't know this, I had no idea, but I was drawn to that same water. So for me it's like a reset a little bit whenever I go there. Oklahoma is kind of like. It's like the center of the world with regard to my family there.

Crista Cowan: 32:37

Yeah, they're the places that made them Right and we get to set our feet on them Right. I love that. Well, I am always proud to call you my cousin, same but I think I'm even more proud to call you my colleague. Your example of just tenacity and persistence in making the discoveries that you make and your willingness to be open and to see where things lead, I think, has just been such an example to me in the decade and a half now that we've known each other Teenager Almost. So, thank you, thank you for being delightful. Thank you for being my three-peat guest. Yes, yes, thank you for being here. Thank you for being my three-peat guest.

Nicka Sewell-Smith: 33:17

Yes, yes, absolutely. Thank you for being here, awesome.

Crista Cowan: 33:19

Thanks for having me Studio sponsored by Ancestry.