Ancestors

Josiah Thomas

Josiah Thomas was born on 10 March 1865 near Old Doaksville, just north of Fort Towson, in the Choctaw Nation. That is the date he gave himself. His father was Simon Willis and his mother Cilian Anderson. His father died while he was young, his mother married again, and Josiah took his stepfather's name. "And so I have been known as Thomas," he said. When the family was enrolled in 1899 the clerk wrote his father down by a Choctaw name, Ish-te-me-lachuby, already dead, and his mother as Sillin, still living in Cedar County in 1896.

His grandfather Atichi had come west from Mississippi and settled near Doaksville, and lived there until he died. The grandfather went into the Confederate service at the start of the war and stayed in it to the end. Josiah's father joined late and did not serve long. The Choctaw Nation had signed a treaty with the Confederacy in 1861, and its men served in Choctaw regiments.

He grew up in a log house with no floor and the fire in the middle of the room. He went to school for one term and did not learn much. All his life he spoke and read Choctaw and very little English. By about 1896 he had married Elbina Narlett, a full-blood girl of about seventeen whose father Adam Narlett lived in Nashoba County. He went by Joe.

On 29 April 1899 Josiah applied to the Dawes Commission to enroll his family as Choctaw citizens. The Commission was making the final roll of the tribe, the list that decided who would receive an allotment when the Nation's common land was divided among its members. His card, number 1175, gives his residence as Cedar County with his post office at Doaksville. It lists Josiah, 25, full blood; Elbina, his wife, 20; their sons Lixan, born June 1897, and Impson, born 20 June 1899; and later Joe, born 20 August 1901. Josiah swore to the births himself, as the man who attended his wife. He signed with his mark. The Secretary of the Interior approved the family's enrollment on 12 December 1902, under roll numbers 3196 to 3200.

The baby enrolled as Joe was really Billy, and he died at about a year old. Josiah went before the Commission on 23 May 1903 and said so, and the correction was written on his card and sent to the land offices at Atoka and Tishomingo.

In 1900 he was a farm laborer in Township 4 of the Choctaw Nation, with Elbina and the two boys. In January 1920 the family was in Pushmataha County: Josiah, 50, Elbina, 40, Impson, 20, and seven younger children from Agnes, 13, down to Rismon, four months, with three more young people of the Billy and Chubber families in the house. Every person in the house was entered as Indian. The family remembered sixteen children in all. Abraham Lincoln was born about 1919 and Edna on 9 June 1923.

In his seventies he lived about twenty-five miles east of Antlers, near Corinne, where he had been raised. A field worker named Johnson H. Hampton came to see him there about 1937 and wrote down what he remembered of his childhood. In April 1950 he was at Kiamichi, Pushmataha County, and the census gave his age as 86.

He died on 2 June 1962 in Antlers Township and was buried in Antlers City Cemetery. His marker reads MR JOSIAH THOMAS, 1860, 1962. His son Impson had died three years before him.

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Cite: Heirology, "Josiah Thomas (1865-1962)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/josiah-thomas-1865-1962-cd0945.