There are four phratries in the tribe, the three gentes Bear, Deer, and Striped Turtle constituting the first; the Highland Turtle, Black Turtle, and Smooth Large Turtle the second; the Hawk, Beaver, and Wolf the third, and the Sea Snake and Porcupine the fourth.
This unit in their organization has a mythologic basis, and is chiefly used for religious purposes, in the preparation of medicines, and in festivals and games.
The eleven gentes, as four phratries, constitute the tribe.
Each gens is a body of consanguineal kindred in the female line, and each gens is allied to other gentes by consanguineal kinship through the male line, and by affinity through marriage.
This is an excerpt from a paper recently posted on Project Gutenberg which I post-processed — [Wyandot Government: A Short Study of Tribal Society][], by John Wesley Powell, director of the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology (1879). It was published in the First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1879-80, part of a huge series of volumes from the Bureau of American Ethnology that is being processed through DP now.
Recently the project manager asked for post-processing volunteers to help complete some of the projects. I took this one for three reasons: first, it’s short. It has 14 pages, two of which were blank, and a third which had the title only. Second, it has very few diacriticals — many of the BAE projects are filled with transcriptions of Native American speech. Third, and most importantly, my family has Wyandot in it. My father was unsure of which grandmother of his it was, but guessed that my great-great-great-grandmother (1/32) was “full-blooded,” as we used to say.
I wonder what gens she was? How do I even begin to find out?