52 Ancestors: Rachel (Mason) Roe - Hidden in Plain Sight

 

"Did your mom speak Romani, and were your mom and dad both gypsy?"

The question from my newly discovered cousin, Rhonda Krug, stopped me cold. After fifteen years of tracing my ancestors, I thought I had uncovered every family secret. But this? This was something I never saw coming.

My second-great-grandmother, Rachel Mason Roe, had always been one of my more puzzling ancestors. Born around 1863, she appeared in records with frustrating inconsistencies—different birth years, various spellings of her name, and conflicting information about her origins. When I discovered the 1910 census claiming she was "half Chippewa Indian" born in Canada, my mother and I thought we'd finally found the answer to our unknown heritage on that side of the family.

But those inconsistencies that had frustrated me for years suddenly made perfect sense once I understood the truth: Rachel wasn't Native American at all. She was Romani.

The Records That Didn't Add Up

Rachel's paper trail reads like a genealogist's nightmare. In 1880, at age 16, she lived in Minneapolis as the daughter of Fred Meyers (though his name appears as "Mason" in other records). By June 1881, she had married William Wise in Howard, Iowa—but eighteen months later, in January 1883, she married Jonathan Josiah Roe in Missouri. What happened to William Wise? He simply vanished from the records, likely an outsider who couldn't adapt to the traveling lifestyle and disappeared into the American landscape.

Jonathan, however, was different. He became part of Rachel's family's traveling band, joining them for nearly two decades as they moved across the Midwest before finally settling in Oklahoma around 1908. Together, they had several children: Jesse, Bessie, Pier, Frank, and Jay.

The 1910 census found them in Noble County, Oklahoma, where Rachel made her strategic claim to be "half Chippewa." By then, she understood what many Romani families had learned: in America, it was safer to be seen as Native American than as "Gypsy."

The Truth Emerges

The breakthrough came through DNA testing and the dedicated research of genealogist Frank D. Myers, who wrote extensively about my Romani ancestors on his blog, The Lucas Countyan. Frank's articles, including "Prince Among Gypsies or a Chief of the Cherokee?" explored how my ancestors navigated identity in 19th-century America. Through Frank's research and connections with other descendants like Rhonda, I began to understand that Rachel's confusing records weren't mistakes—they were survival strategies.

The name variations, the shifting birth dates, the creative explanations about origins—all of it reflected the reality of Romani life in America. Whether by design or circumstance, these families rarely left consistent paper trails. Their traveling lifestyle, combined with a healthy wariness of officials and sometimes limited literacy, meant that census takers and clerks recorded whatever seemed most convenient or believable at the moment.

A Pattern of Protection

Rachel's story fits a larger pattern I've discovered among American Romani families. When John Rinehart—another ancestor—died in Chariton, Iowa, in 1881, the local newspaper romanticized him as a "Cherokee chief" whose spirit had joined "the happy hunting grounds beyond the clouds." The reality that he was a Romani leader went unspoken, but the fiction served everyone involved.

While Native Americans certainly faced discrimination and violence, the stigma attached to being "Gypsy" carried additional burdens—associations with criminal behavior and scamming, compounded by their sometimes dark and foreign features. For Romani families, claiming Native American heritage was choosing the lesser of two prejudices. This careful dance of identity would echo through generations, with families like mine learning to navigate discrimination through strategic adaptation.

Rachel's Legacy

Rachel died on March 3, 1918, and was buried in Odd Fellows Cemetery in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Jonathan remains a perplexing mystery—while I can trace his ancestry back generations to Ireland, no one seems to know what happened to him after Rachel's death. But Rachel's story—once I understood her true heritage—opened the door to an entire hidden world.

Through DNA connections and painstaking research, I've traced her Romani roots back to traveling bands in England. Her story became the foundation for understanding a family history that had been carefully obscured for over a century, leading to my book, The Last Wagon: An American Family's Journey from Settlement to Assimilation, which explores the full scope of our family's journey from European roads to American settlement.

Rachel's life reminds us that our ancestors were far more complex than their records suggest. Sometimes, the most important family stories are the ones that were deliberately hidden, waiting for future generations to uncover them and understand why the truth needed to be buried in the first place.