July 17, 2013

FINEST HOUR 126, SPRING 2005

==================

“CHURCHILL HAD AMERICAN INDIAN ANCESTORS”

Some Churchills delighted in extolling the legend of their Native American blood, believed to have been introduced through Jennie Jerome’s maternal grandmother, Clarissa Willcox. Randolph S. Churchill, in his biography of his father, noted that the mother of Jennie’s grandmother Clarissa was one Anna Baker, whose “mother’s maiden name is not recorded in the genealogies” and “is believed to have been an Iriquois [sic] Indian.” We now know not only Anna Baker’s mother’s name but something of her background, which is fairly dispositive.

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024
More

Joseph Baker of Rhode Island married Experience Martin of Massachusetts in 1760. Circa 1761 Joseph and Experience Baker, together with Joseph’s brother William and two male cousins, migrated to Sackville, Nova Scotia, where Anna Baker reputedly was born. They were all living at Sackville in 1770, but returned to New England around 1787, when Anna Baker married David Willcox. By 1791 the couple had moved to Palmyra, in northern New York State, where Willcox had a farm and blacksmith shop. Anna Baker Willcox’s daughter Clarissa was born 30 September 1796. David and Anna are buried together in Palmyra, where their headstones may still be seen. Anna’s father, Joseph Baker, died in 1796 and in his will named his daughter, “Anne Willcocks.”

Ralph Martin, in Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, suggested that Anna Baker “may have been raped by an [Iroquois] Indian and that [her daughter] Clarissa Willcox may have been half-caste,” which, even for itself seems definitive. Of course it is possible that Clarissa may have been an illegitimate half-Indian, with the Willcoxes bringing her up as a daughter; but this is harder to believe than the simple, forthright facts as recorded by her colonial family in their probate records. The absence of proof does not make a story untrue; but it does not establish it, either.

In the absence of any real proof we are left with the stories passed on through the Jerome family over the years of some ancestor’s supposed Indian blood. That these stories existed, and were believed, is undeniable; but they could have any number of origins. It is just as possible that other children, confronted with a dark complexioned Anna Baker, teased and even convinced her that she had Indian blood as that she really was, however improbably, part-Indian.

The Churchill world does not easily give up its myths, no matter how fanciful. Sir Winston, to whose romantic nature the story appealed, was known to believe it, as did some members of his family. Sir Winston’s grandson in his book, The Great Republic, while stating his continued bias to believe, leaves it to the reader to decide if there is Native American blood in the Jerome line. —Excerpted from “Urban Myths: Indian Forebears,” by Elizabeth Churchill Snell, Finest Hour 104, Autumn 1999. 

 

A tribute, join us

#thinkchurchill

Subscribe

WANT MORE?

Get the Churchill Bulletin delivered to your inbox once a month.