User:Dianekay/sandboxindianpioneer papers

"My mother, Carolina Jones, was born in the state of Tenneessee and is buried there. My grandmother on my mother's side, Nancy Jones, was born in the state of Mississippi and is buried in White County, Tennessee. I was born April 3, 1849, at Stagestand, White County, Tennessee... There were three more children in our family older than I; my father died when I was a very small baby and my mother could not take care of all the children as she was not able to care for us and make the living for us that she wanted us to have so she let Spencer Holder and wife have me to raise and I stayed with them until I was grown. "

This paragraph begins a fourteen page interview of William Perry Earles of Ringling, Oklahoma, 1938 as part of a project called The Indian-Pioneer Papers. In 1936, the Oklahoma Historical Society and University of Oklahoma requested a writer's project grant from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in which they would obtain a grant to interview early settlers in Oklahoma who had lived on Indian land.

The more than 100 writers conducted more than 11,000 interviews and were asked to "call upon early settlers and (record) the story of the migration to Oklahoma and their early life here."

The University of Oklahoma Western History Collection has digitized the Indian Pioneer Papers collection which consists of approximately 80,000 indexed entries arranged alphabetically by personal name place name or subject.