Jones Choctaw Family – List of Mixed Blood

[80]The Jones family represents one of the longest lists of this study with sixty-one family members being listed in records (see Chart 13). Despite the probable duplication of

Key to Chart

Probable = P,  Countryman = C,  Yes = Y,  Trader = T,
Married = md,  Mixed Blood = mb

Chart 13[81a]

Jones Choctaw Family – List of Mixed Blood

[82]names there are by conservative estimate more than fifty valid individuals represented. Of the twenty-five on the Armstrong roll a family total of one hundred nineteen yields a family average size of just below five. At least four mixed bloods are named: William, Soloman, Polly, and Siney, with William being identified by three sources. Three Jones countrymen: John, Jonathon, and Michael lived along the Tombigbee River. Michael, possibly the patriarch, appears on a Spanish census of 1780 as “gone to the nation,” and was probably a trader as well as a countryman. ¹

Jonathon, Polly, and William Jones are described as Creek Indian full bloods or mixed bloods. Because no genealogy of the mixed-blood Jones family is known, one assumes that they are for the most part members of a single line. Thomas Woodward in his Reminiscences mentions:

“A man named Sam Jones took with him into the [Creek] Nation from Fort Wilkinson a woman named Betsy Coulter; Jim Cornells swapped his niece, Polly Kean, with Jones, and took Betsy Coulter for a wife- She was the woman that Peter McQueen and Jim Boy captured and carried to Pensacola, and sold to Madame Barrone. Sam Jones married Polly Kean — and in 1816, and near about the time that Col. Fisher and Jim Collier killed Bradberry, and Col. Phillips killed Roberts, Jim Cornells killed Sam Jones. Polly then married one-eyed Billy Oliver, an old countryman [friend] of mine. ²

[83]Another possible Jones mixed-blood progenitor could have been “John Jones, a soldier…[who] deserted…[the garrison at Fort Stoddert in 1799 and had] gone to the Chickasaw Indians to live.” ³ There is also reason to connect the Jones family with Jones Bluff near Fort Confederation in Alabama, not far from the present-day town of Meridian, Mississippi, and yet another Jones lived on the Alabama River near Charles Weatherford and Peter Randon, both mixed bloods. ⁴ Pickett also lists a Jones as a survivor of the massacre at Fort Mims but does not furnish a first name for him, although Halbert and Bail in their history of the Creek War list R. Jones, possibly Robert, as a militia officer in late 1813. ⁵ It is possible to see the thread of Jones mixed bloods stretching from Creek country up the Tombigbee and over along the Oknuxaby, Pearl and Yazoo River fronts where they are counted by Armstrong in 1831. A John Jones was present on Ward’s Register and may have been related to the Creek mixed blood, Jonathon Jones, who was also credited with being a Revolutionary War veteran. It is also worth noting that wealthy Robert M. Jones was active in Choctaw affairs after removal to Indian territory. ⁶

1. Debt list of William Loyson, 1795, Archivo General de Indias, Papeles de Cuba (hereafter cited as AGI), Legajo #200.[↩]
2. Woodward, Reminisinces, III.[↩]
3. Jack D. L. Holmes, “Fort Stoddard in 1799: Seven Letters of Captain Bartholomew Schaumburgh,” Alabama Historical Quarterly (Fall 1964), 26:242.[↩]
4. Hamilton, Colonial Mobile, 427.[↩]
5. Halbert and Ball, Creek War, 245.[↩]
6. Arrel M. Gibson, The Chickasaws, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976) 274; Debo, Rise and Fall, p. 60; Baird, Peter Pitchlynn, 74.[↩]