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Eliza(h) Jane Gore, born 1845 in Okalona, Tennessee, was the grandmother of my father, John Roy Williams, born 1907 in Oklahoma. She was the daughter of William Carroll "Tipton" and Cherokee Jane Gore. William Carroll Gore was the son of Henry Gore who married Mary Carmack. Henry Gore served in the War of 1812 and he is buried in the Carmack Cemetery at Okalona, TN. All the early Gores who lived in Jackson, Livingston and Overton Counties, Tennessee, were related. The Tennessee Gores came into Tennessee from New Market, Shenandoah County, Virginia. We are a collateral line of Senator Albert Gore Sr. and V. P. Albert "Al" Gore Jr. We are proud of our famous cousins but we are proud of them all.
The early Gores in Tennessee, prior to the Civil War, took advantage of their natural environment making their money by ferrying log rafts up the Cumberland River to the Ohio River and down the Mississippi to the shipbuilding port of New Orleans. They sold the logs and traveled back up the Natchez Trace through Mississippi & Alabama, by foot or on horse, to return home again. However, it seems that William Carroll Gore, the son of Henry, did not engage in the logging business but was a hunter and trapper selling his pelts and goods at Fort Massac, Illinois, the nearest large military fort up the Cumberland located on the Ohio River. After leaving Tennessee and settling in Missouri, he lived among and near the Deleware Town and the Swan Trading Post in southwest Missouri in between Springfield and the Arkansas border. There he also continued trapping, hunting and trading pelts to be sold to St. Louis.
Although we do not know the surnames or Native American names of either of William Carroll "Tipton" Gores Cherokee wives, Jane or Nancy, we do have enough proof that they were, indeed, Cherokee. Research has revealed that a Cherokee Village was not more than 200 yards from where Henry Gore raised his family there in Okalona and my great grandmother, Eliza Jane Gore, told my aunt, Hulda Williams, from the time she was a young child that she was a Cherokee from Tennessee. Hulda made an affidavit to this statement. As well, a pamphlet in the rare book section of the Springfield Missouri Library also reveals this Cherokee blood line.
William Carroll "Tipton" Gore and Jane and their children, including Eliza Jane, were on the 1850 Census at Fort Massac in Massac County, Illinois. Jane, apparently, died on this trip and her burial place is unknown. William returned to Okalona and remarried to Cherokee Nancy "Granny" Gore, the suspected sister of Jane. By the 1860 Census, William and his new wife, Nancy, and his children by Jane, including Eliza Jane, were on the Carrol County, Arkansas Census where Nancy's first child was born. From there, the family moved into southwest Missouri to the confluence of the White and James Rivers in Stone County where William became acquainted with the William Gilliss and Joseph Philiburt Families who maintained trading posts with the Delaware and Painkeshaw Indians of that area as recorded by Senator Emory Melton in his book, Delaware Town and the Swan Trading Post.
William Carroll and Nancy "Granny" Gore lived near Joseph Philibert at the confluence of the White and James Rivers where they were buried in the Old Joseph Philibert Cemetery there. Several of their children lived at Owens Bend including Catherine Paralee Gore who married into the Owens Family. Unfortunately, the Corp of Engineers would build and flood this area with the Table Rock Dam and Lake near Branson in the 1950's. William and Granny Gores homesite lay under the flood waters while Owens Bend was spared. Traveling to Missouri, I researched and found that William Carroll and Nancy had grave and relocation records and were re-interred at the New Philiburt Cemetery at the end of the Branson Strip at Kimberling City across the street from the Kimberling City Chamber of Commerce. Not having much time, I had markers made for their grave sites. Just before our scheduled return, one of the Philiberts gave me the name of Ella Gore Dotson. I contacted her and we were, indeed, related. For twenty years we became faithful cousins.
DEDICATION:
This site is dedicated to Ella Gore Dotson - a great lady who at the early age of about four became orphaned but dedicated her life to the remembrance of her past ancestors and the kind attention to her living kin, as well.
Ella was the daughter of James and Alice White Gore who resided in 1910 at the James Township in Stone County, Missouri with their first son, Carol aka Carl Gore who was three years old on that Census. James named his son, Carol, after his father, William Carol "Tipton" Gore. On the 1920 Washington, Stone County, Missouri Census we find in the household 89/92 of David A and Sarah J. Hardin with the following children: Carol Gore, 13 years old and Ella Gore, 8 years old; both are noted as "Orphan" children. Their ages were switched but we know from the picture Ella had of her and her brother with guardians that she was the younger of the two. She is holding the doll her father had given her before he died and there's no mistaking that her brother was older. Carol and Ella's mother, Alice, no doubt, died at childbirth. Ella lived to be over 90 years old.
Ella and I ran those Ozark Mountains to the places where our early Gores had lived. What fun we had!
W H O A R E T H E S E G O R E S ? ? ?
JAMES L. GORE
