North Carolina, U.S., Native American Census Selected Tribes, 1894-1913

Census books enumerating Cherokee Indians living in communities and counties on the Cherokee or Qualla Reservations in western North Carolina are in this database. These include Big Cove, Yellow Hill, Birdtown, Natahala, Soco, and Wolf Town representing Cherokee, Jackson, Swain, and Graham counties. In the later years of this collection other individual information was recorded such as degree of Indian blood. Be sure to view the corresponding image in order to obtain all possible information about an individual.

Each year agents or superintendents in charge of Indian reservations submitted the Indian Census rolls (required by an act of July 4, 1884 (23 Stat. 98)); however, there is not a census for every reservation or group of Indians for every year. Only persons who maintained a formal affiliation with a tribe under federal supervision are listed on these census rolls. Supplemental rolls of additions and deletions were compiled for these years: 1935, 1936, 1938, and 1939, and most of the rolls for the year 1940 were retained by the Bureau of Indian Affairs because submission was not required after 1940. Only a few post-1940 records are included in this database.

Some of the above information was taken from:

• Curt B. Witcher and George J. Nixon, "Tracking Native American Family History,” in The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy, ed. Loretto Dennis Szucs and Sandra Hargreaves Luebking (Salt Lake City: Ancestry, 1997).


• Publication details of Indian Census Rolls, 1885–1940, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Information in this database:

• Name, Indian and/or English
• Gender
• Age
• Birth date
• Head of household
• Relationship to head of household
• Marital Status
• Tribe name
• Agency and reservation name

Information that may be included in this database:

• Household members ages 5 to 20 who did not attend school during the year
• Household members who could read and converse in English
• Number of occupied and unoccupied dwellings
• Number of church members
• Number of males over age 18
• Number of females over age 14
• Number of school children between ages 6 and 16

Notes about Searching the Censuses

When browsing this large collection, it is important to note the following:

1. Family groups are listed together and are sometimes listed alphabetically by surname of the head of the family, but there is often no discernible order to the listing of families.
2. Currently accepted spellings of tribal names have been used in the listings. In the census rolls themselves, obsolete spellings are often used and the name of a tribe may be spelled several ways in different rolls. Sometimes even the name used for a tribe was changed from year to year.