By Richard Green

For February 2010 Times

Few of us can recall what we were doing on any particular date unless it was associated with something either very, very good or very, very bad.

And so it is with Kerry Armstrong who slammed into the latter group this past October 27. Armstrong is a long-time Chickasaw family historian, researcher and originator and keeper of the website, chickasawhistory.com. As he recounted in an e-mail to Marlene Clark, one of the many people he has assisted with Chickasaw genealogy, he and his wife were returning from Arizona to their home in Fort Worth, Texas, when a traffic tie-up on I-40 in Amarillo obliged them to stop.

As they waited for the traffic to move, they were--without warning-- “violently rear ended” and propelled into the vehicle in front of them.

After emerging from several seconds of shock, Kerry realized his head and neck were hurting. His anxiety was compounded by the fact that his wife, Sandy, had sustained a serious and painful foot injury and because she is diabetic, he knew that injuries could involve potentially dangerous complications.

He continued to assess the situation, thinking like the lawyer he had been before his retirement from the district attorney’s office in Fort Worth. Their car was badly damaged, not drivable.  He felt in his shirt pocket for his phone. Gone. The glasses he had been wearing? Gone. He reached forward and pressed the On-Star button. As he spoke with the dispatcher, he says it was like he was participating in one of the emergency service company’s commercials he had seen on TV.

By the time the ambulance arrived, the hematoma on his wife’s foot was as big as a hen’s egg. Kerry was afraid to move, a decision validated by the EMTs, who had a difficult time extracting him from the car since the passenger’s seat he was in had been broken by the collision.

During their evening’s stay in an emergency department, they learned that they had no broken bones, were stable and would be discharged soon. Their son and daughter arrived and drove them on the uncomfortable ride back to Fort Worth.

At the end of December, Sandy still couldn’t wear a shoe on her injured foot and sometimes needed help walking. Kerry’s diagnosis and prognosis are more complicated.

Even before the accident, he had bulging disks in his lower back and for almost two years has been suffering from neuropathy, a painful and incurable condition of the nerves in his legs and feet.

The accident made things worse. He is now a man in motion, standing, sitting, reclining, forever searching for a relatively comfortable position. With pain medication, he tries to strike a balance between masking the pain and becoming sedated and perhaps dependent upon the painkillers.

After more imaging and tests, Kerry will learn his surgeon’s opinion on the risks and benefits of surgery intended to relieve the pressure on nerves encased inside the vertebral column of his spine. Even if the recommendation is to have the surgery, Kerry realizes that neurosurgeons don’t issue guarantees.

All this is prelude to the fact that while his valuable website is still available to us, Kerry will not be. At least not unless or until he regains the energy and reserves needed to continue the avocation that he has been practicing since the 1990s. As an optimist, he calls it a hiatus rather than retirement.

                                         Getting Started

In 1994, only about 1,300 web pages or sites were on the Internet. Within a year the number had jumped appreciably and Kerry was one of the earliest researchers to begin doing family history research on the Internet. In an article in a 1997 issue of The Journal of Chickasaw History, he wrote that he had “high hopes” of accessing university computers stocked with Chickasaw reference materials and of “making contact with some distant cousin who had the data on all my genealogical dead-ends.”

He came away disappointed but didn’t realize until later that he was “looking at an innovation that was still in its infancy.” In the intervening two years, he found that pertinent new material was being added frequently.

While this was helpful, Kerry thought he might speed up the process by creating and adding his own research source to the Internet so data could be shared mutually. He started posting information from web sources but also records he had copied from repositories that he has visited.

He first visited the Chickasaw Council House Museum in Tishomingo about 1990 and met Glenda Galvan, then director of the tribal library and archives. “Kerry stayed for several hours collecting information on his family tree from our archives. Before he left, he asked if we minded if he periodically sent us items that could be added to our Chickasaw collection.”

With Galvan’s encouragement, Kerry brought in cemetery records and records for various prominent Chickasaw families including Colbert, Burney, McLish and Love. “His donations have amounted to a genealogical endowment, from which many Chickasaws have benefited,” Galvan wrote in a 1995 tribute to him. She also noted in the article that Gov. Anoatubby at the annual meeting had presented Armstrong with a plaque expressing the tribe’s appreciation for his contributions.

The repository where Kerry obtained most records for his website is the one in his own backyard, the National Archives southwest regional archives in Fort Worth. Stored there are most post-Removal Chickasaw records. If you type chickasawhistory.com on your browser and click enter you will be greeted with Chokmah! and the Great Seal of the Chickasaw Nation (the Chickasaw Legislature granted Kerry permission to use it several years ago).

                                          Chickasawhistory. com

The first research section contains selected Chickasaw Nation-United States correspondence from the 1790s to 1849. There are also tribal rolls and census information, entries in family Bibles, and copies of the most significant Chickasaw-U.S. treaties.

Other material includes a letter from Chief Edmund Pickens, the 1939 memoirs of Mary Chisholm Cook, and copies of Chickasaw land sales in Mississippi from 1836-37.

Kerry also posted the 1840 observations of Malcolm McGee, who lived with and worked for the tribe from the 1760s through Removal.

He also included the descendants of James Logan Colbert, whose marriages with three Chickasaw women produced generations of Chickasaw chiefs and other leaders. He told me this part of his website is intended to provide clues to persons interested in Colbert genealogy. “Some researchers are too willing to accept or adopt everything as gospel that they read somewhere or find on the web.”

A few years ago, Kerry says there was some misinformation circulating about Colberts living in Alabama and Mississippi. People thought Colberts living in the states (of the former tribal homeland) had to be descendants of James Colbert. “We looked into it, and yes, there were Colberts living there, but they were not related to the Chickasaw Colberts. It was like saying every Armstrong in the world is my cousin.”

Kerry hopes people realize that what the Colbert component of his website contains are suggestions, not answers. “Researchers have to do their own work to sort out their family histories.”

In the past, Kerry was available to help. After he retired as associate district attorney a few years ago, he sometimes spent hours of research time to better prepare or direct some people who he believed were serious and would follow through with their research.

But now and in the foreseeable future, sitting in front of the computer is too painful for Kerry. While he remains on “hiatus” for however long, he says he has “no intention of shutting it down for good.” In fact, he recently paid the $72 annual fee to keep his website on the Internet. He says he loves helping fellow Chickasaws who are serious about tracing their Indian roots.

It’s just that simple, and that challenging, satisfying and fulfilling.