Looking for information

[navajo]

Allie

I was told from Yankton that Yellowbird One Elk (original allottee)had more than one wife, and that Lydia Shortfoot inherited this land. I asked if she was one of the wives and I was told "don't know". From Lydia this was passed on to my grandfather James Wabashaw Robertson and his son Clinton Yerba Robertson from his first marriage to Lillian Miller. From James this was passed down to my late father Mark Francis Robertson (James Wabashaw Robertson's son from his second marriage to my Navajo grandmother) and now to me. I guess what I am not sure of did Lydia Shortfoot (mother of Ida Shortfoot Mahpiyahotanka Robertson and Nancy Mahpiyahotanka Robertson) marry more than once???

Beth

[allie]

Beth, I'm not sure if you picked up on what I was getting at. When I was researching my ancestor His Cloud Eagle Ear. I thought this was one person but it turns out the agencies always put the wife's name first and then the husbands. So His Cloud was married to Eagle Ear.
You know, I was real surprised to find out that a couple of my grandmother's were married more than twice! We had to be real careful about who we went out with on different reservations! LOL So yeeeahhh! I would say your grandparents were probably married a few times!

Allie

[navajo]

Allie

No I did not pick up on that. I knew Thomas R was married twice before he married Ida. And I knew that Margaret Aird was married twice. To find out about the way the agencies put the wife's first etc is very interesting. I know Thomas's Indian name was Zitkanahowaste (Zitkana means bird or yellowbird?) and I do not know the full translation of the rest of his name. Also Ida's was Lyksauksauwin (I think this is the correct spelling it is hard to read the census taker's writing) and I would like to find out the translation of this name as well.

Ida and Thomas's first son was Charles A. Robertson, Indian name Munayaunke and the second son was Norman W. Robertson, Indian name Iyomhiyayedan and if you know of any one who can translate these please let me know.

Beth

[navajo]

Allie

My family pictures are now on the site, under Sioux pictures, Sisseton. Vicky posted these for me, because I did not know how.

Beth

[hermin1]

Beth: I don't know where allie got the idea that the agencies put the wife's name first,because the indian Censues i have looked at and i have looked at plenty, always put the husbands name first.

[hermin1]

Beth:
Do you have the information on thomas robertson's mother jane anderson and her mother and Grandmother? please let me know, if you don't.
jane anderson , daughter of Margerite Greycloud woman, married andrew robertson, a scotsman. he had had some disappointments in scottish politics and so he changed his nme to Robertson and came to America.
he and jane had the following children:Agnes, andrew Jr., william,Jenney, and thomas A.
thomas A. was married at least 3 times:
1st was Maggie. The 2nd was ida Shortfoot. they hadcharles A., Norman, Samuel, robert and james.
the 3ed was Niyawastewin,d/o Josephine laughing. they had a son, Thomas T. robertson,. thomas t. married Agnes Long, the d/o James Long, and Emma goodboy. They had a granddaughter who died recently in North Dakota. They may have had other children also.

Martha Shortfoot was married to Louis laBelle.

[hermin1]

I think thomas a.'s name translatess to Good voice bird. thomas's first wife maggie ,I think was the sister of thomas robinson. she later maried Joseph laRocque.


________________________________
I apologize for the above error.
I had Maggie mixed up with Madeliene Robinson, who was Thomas Robinson's sister, who was the wife of Joseph LaRocque.
I haen't been able to find out what maggie's Indian name was.

[navajo]

Hermin

Thank you for the new info on Thomas's other wives. The only thing I knew about were both of the Grey Cloud women being the daughter and granddaughter of Wabasha I, their husbands I am only recently researching. My father told me that "Robertson" was probably not our real last name, because he was told that his great grandfather (Andrew Robertson) changed his last name and he never knew why or Andrew's real name. Any thing you want to share with me wiil be so much appreciated. Now that you mention it I recall thinking that the first 2 children of Thomas's first wife were too old to have been Ida's because she was not much older than her oldest stepson.

Beth Robertson

[hermin1]

Beth:
GreyCloud Woman(Sr.) was the daughter of Wabashaw I.
she was born at her father's village, near what is now Winona,MN>Her spouse was James
Aird, the trader. She married James Aird in 1783 or soon after.James Aird died in 1819 or 1820 at Prairie du Chien. Their daughter Margaret,also called Grey Cloud Woman, was married 2x:

1. Capt. Thomas Anderson. Wed @1805 at prairie du Chien. He died at Point Hope,Canada, in 1874. their children were:
Mary, Angus, and Jane. Jane as you already know was the w/o Andrew Robertson. I found some interesteing info. It appears that Andrew robertson had started to tell his family about his real family history on his death bed, but died before he could tell them everything. that 2 lawyers had gone to Sotland to find out about Andrew Robertson family history, and on their return from there took passage on the fated ship ,the Titanic. They and the documents they brought with them went down with the ship.

Getting back to Jane's mother Margaret, her second spouse was Hazen Mooers, who had been her husbands clerk.
Hazen Moores had a son by a previous liaison with a Mdewakanton woman named Mary Wakanhditaninwin, named John Mooers aka Kahoton. Margaret and Hazen had three daughters, Mary, Madeline and Jane Ann who an epileptic. John , their step brother looked after the latter sister for the rest of her life. Hazen, after Margaret died, remarried to a widow named Ellen Larkin, and they had a daughter Ellen, born @1855. Hazen and his last wife and daughter settled on a farm near Ft. Ridgley. I believe he is buried there in the cemetery.
Grey Cloud Island was named in honor of Grey Cloud woman.

[hermin1]

Beth: write to Louie Garcia about those names and he will be able to translate them for you.
His Email is [e-mail]

[Vicky]

I'm sure this won't be terribly helpful, but I am posting it here because the web site where it used to be located no longer has it available. Formerly from the Joseph R. Brown web site-

THE DAYBREAK WOMAN--JANE Robertson

Among the books donated to the Joseph R. Brown Library by Larry Randen is a copy of The Minnesota: Forgotten River by Evan Jones. A shortened version of Chapter 16, the story of Daybreak Woman or Jane Robertson, is presented here as another in the series about people with whom Brown was associated.

"Jane Robertson was born in 1810 at the mouth of the Yellow Medicine. The sluggish Minnesota pulsed through her life as it did through no one else's story. It had carried her toward lower Canada, where she had spent her girlhood, and when she married, the river drew her irresistibly homeward. She was the river's daughter and her story reflected, as the river did, the change in the valley's destiny. . . . In her person this bois brulÇ, called the Daybreak Woman by the Sioux, brought together the world of wilderness and civilization. . . .
Her grandfather, James Ayrd, . . . came into the Minnesota country as a Hudson's Bay Company trader toward the end of the eighteenth century. At Prairie du Chien he married Grey Cloud, a daughter of the great chief Wabasha, and as time would have it he had his own daughter Margaret, who was also called Grey Cloud by her Sioux relatives.
In 1805 . . . Grey Cloud married Thomas Anderson, a Scots-Canadian who worked for her father. Five years later Anderson and Grey Cloud headed up the Minnesota to take over a Hudson's Bay Company post on the shores of Lake Traverse. Their daughter Jane was born before they reached their destination. The family's respite in the valley was short; war broke out in 1812 and Tom Anderson turned down river again to enlist in the British army. With the defeat of the mother country he refused to become an American citizen as other fur traders did and Grey Cloud herself refused to leave the land of her Sioux relatives. She was persuaded to let Anderson take the Daybreak Woman and her brother to Canada where they might be better educated.
Grey Cloud did not turn her back on life. She met Hazen Mooers when he came west from New York, and in 1818 they traveled up the river, past the site of her daughter's birth, to trade with the Indians in the Lake Traverse region.
Eighteen years later, in Canada, the Daybreak Woman began an odyssey in search of Grey Cloud. In 1838, she left her father's Canadian household as the wife of Andrew Robertson, whose nuptial promise had been to help her find her mother. In May they sailed a Mackinaw boat across Lake Michigan, and in a bark canoe they paddled together up the Fox and down the Wisconsin to Prairie du Chien where they learned that Grey Cloud and Hazen Mooers were on the Minnesota. . . . The Place was called Little Rock. . . .
A generation had passed since the Daybreak Woman had been among her mother's people. There was a Scots burr to her English . . . but deep within lay a memory of the twisting stream and the quiet trees that screened the water from the high valley walls. . . . At long last, in the August sunlight, Grey Cloud and the Daybreak woman shyly approached each other.
The reunion was also the beginning of a lasting partnership between the Daybreak Woman's husband and Hazen Mooers. Robertson joined Mooers in trading at Little Rock Creek, and a couple of years later they abandoned the fur business together when they turned over their outpost to Joe LaFramboise. The two men took Grey Cloud and the Daybreak Woman downstream and began to farm on the Mississippi island that is still named for Mooers' wife.
The two families moved when Mooers and Robertson were hired to teach the Sioux how to farm, then moved again when together they were delegated to construct the buildings that would house the new Indian agencies after the signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. When Grey Cloud died, the Daybreak Woman started upriver for the last time with her stepfather, her husband and [son Thomas].
Jane Robertson, the Daybreak Woman, was at Andrew Robertson's side when Indian Agent Joe Brown named him the first superintendent of Indian education on the Sioux reservations. When a heart attack cut Robertson down in 1859, Joe Brown had no hesitation about his successor. The job went to Jane Robertson, who was back in the valley of her birth--and back among the people of her almost- obliterated Indian heritage."

The Conflict of 1862 caused many relocations of whites and Indians. In time, Jane Robertson and some of her children (mother of ten) settled in South Dakota in the Sisseton Reservation area; the Brown family was nearby in Browns Valley, Minnesota. June Robertson Lehman of Morton, Minnesota, a great-grand- daughter of Jane and Andrew has said the Robertsons and Browns "were so close where you found one you found the other." June's genealogy on file in the Brown Library, shows that Martha Robertson married Joseph R. Brown Jr. and that William Robertson married Augusta Brown. The cemetery at Old Indian agency Episcopal Church on the Sisseton Reservation is the final resting place of the mothers, Jane Robertson and Susan Brown.

[hermin1]

vicky, that is a great find!!!

[navajo]

Vicky

Yes great find indeed. I am awaiting the arrival of the book through my local library loan program.

Thank you Vicky and Hermin for all of your help

Beth Robertson

[hermin1]

You are most welcomeglad we could help.
You are always welcome to come and chat or share information.

[wakanhotanin]

Vicky:
I am intersted in what you have to say about J. R. Brown Library.
I am confused (as usual -ha-ha) is this a building or a Website?
Allanson (sp?) his son-in-law has a lot of goodies floating around somewhere too.
Louie

[Vicky]

Hi Louie,
There used to be a wonderful web site by the Joseph R. Brown Heritage Center, I believe it was called. I found the above article many years ago, so I don't know when the web site ceased to exist. There was some wonderful information there. I do not know if this was by the JRB museum or just who ran it. I think there is a Joseph R. Brown museum somewhere though. Maybe one of the locals can tell us where it is located. Maybe Brown's Valley?
Sorry I can't be more help.
Vicky

[Vicky]

It's located in Henderson MN, Louie-

www.jrb.org/

I found the old link to the article above. It was located here, but the link is dead.
www.jrb.org/newsletters/volume3-2.htm

Their site used to have a lot more info than they do now.

[rayhenry]

Thanks Vickie,
For the JRB site. I found some stuff that helped. Since Helen Dickson Brown later married Moses Arconge, it is another tie to the Arconge-Yellow Cloud tree. I knew Helen was once married to Joseph Brown but had nothing on him. This part may be of interest for someone. It is from the JRB site, under research

An effective fur trader needed a wife with tribal connections. Brown married Helen Dickson at Prairie du Chien, while he was still in the army. Helen Dickson was a daughter of an influential British trader and a Sisseton woman. His second wife, Margaret McCoy, was part Ojibwe. His third, Susan Frenier, was related to the bands near Lake Traverse and to the Lower Sioux, including Little Crow. Her half-brother was Gabriel Renville, who became Brown’s ward in 1841, his fur trade partner in 1842, a military scout under Brown’s command in 1863, and later chief of the Sisseton-Wahpeton bands. Ray

[Vicky]

I am so happy something there helped, Ray! :-)

[naomi]

looking for information about the larocque