Ancestry.com records corroborated oral claims about Renty Thompson’s family.

Evidence

By now Shonrael was building our family tree on Ancestry.com, adding new leaves, finding information in the website’s vast database, adding to what we already had collected. I was also using the site to do research and found all kinds of useful information that supported my mother’s stories, including a crisper copy of George Thompson’s death certificate than the one the Connecticut Historical Society sent to me, which was a photocopy and difficult to read. I printed that out and placed it in my ever-expanding three-ring binder, receipts that proved Papa Renty was my ancestor. I was also delighted to find a record that listed my great-grandmother Ophelia, Renty Thompson’s wife, on the “Wallace Roll of Cherokee Freedmen, 1880 to 1892,” which backed up my mother’s claim that she was Native American. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 553

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the Wallace Roll of Cherokee Freedmen as a documentary source connecting Black families to Native ancestry.