My Ancestor is William Riley Stricklin, born 1802 in SC, resided in Franklin County, TN by the 1830 Census, moved to Alabama about 1835 and was living in Blount County, Alabama by the 1840 Census.

For some time I have been at a stalemate in my search to find William’s parents and his wife’s parents. Last year my brother submitted a DNA sample to the Strickland DNA project and we hoped we would find our Strickland links but that did not happen. What we did discover is that our male ancestral line (Stricklin) is Native American and though our line does not match anyone else, so far, that has participated in the Strickland DNA Study, our Stricklin ancestors apparently have ancestors in common with the forebears of George Logan (b. c1770 SC d. aft 1840 AL) and also with several members of the Tapp family who trace their ancestry back to a William Taptico who was supposed to be a Native American tribal leader, or werowance during the late 1600s in the area of Northumberland County, Virginia.

I can only speculate and theorize how our Native American ancestor became a Stricklin. I have seen many claims on different Strickland web sites that Native American women married Strickland men but I don’t know that I have ever seen anyone else claim to be descended from a male Native American Stricklin/Strickland in this time frame.

Indeed, stories handed down in my Stricklin family owned no such heritage for our male Stricklin line. It was always said that the Stricklins were Scots-Irish and some German, and for the last 4-5 generations there have been many red headed and blue eyed descendants (my father, grandfather, g-grandfather), but family history owns that many of the women these men married were of Native American ancestry. Three of William Riley Stricklin’s children married siblings that were said to be the grandchildren of a half Native American.

I invite anyone interested to explore the following web sites that might provide clues to Strickland Native American Ancestry and encourage anyone interested in exploring Strickland DNA links to participate in the Strickland DNA study.

http://tappfamily.us/kot/taptico.php

http://www.wicocomico-indian-nation.com/pages/history.html

Judy Stricklin Dover (jgsdover@bellsouth.net)