Our Rogers Tribe

Halito, Chim Achukma? (That's "Hello, how are you?" in the Choctaw language).

I am Marcia (Rogers) Foley, and I hope you will join me as I explore and learn about my Choctaw history. The photo on the right is very appropriate to use as a beginning, and is priceless to me. It was made in 1915 or 1916, and shows my father, Marcus Newton Rogers, standing next to a chair covered with a large buffalo hide onto which his baby sister, Lucille, has been placed.

The photo above is of myself and was taken at my desk when I was about 45 years old... seems like a millennium ago. Photo right: my father Marcus Newton Rogers and his sister Sarah Lucille Rogers; photo taken about 1915-1916.

There is still a great deal of information that I do not have about my father, but I know tons more than I did three months ago!

He was born to Reginald Rhea (pronounced Ray) Rogers and his wife Minnie (Burke) Rogers, on June 13, 1913 in Wade, Oklahoma. Read about his parent's elopement here. About two years later, his sister Lucille was born.

His parents were divorced when he was small, and he and his sister were raised off and on by their Choctaw grandmother, Lucinda (Hampton) Burke, who was born about 1875, in Oklahoma. She used to tell my father of the stories of her mother, Charlotte (Folsom) Hampton, who walked the trail of tears. My mother also told me those stories, for she had heard them from Lucinda. She respected Lucinda a great deal.

At left, my father Marcus, and my maternal grandfather, Sam McClure. Photo taken about 1938.

In 1913, smallpox was running rampant in Oklahoma. Minnie caught it while she was pregnant, and my father was born with smallpox. They took him to the hospital at Durant, Oklahoma for treatment, and he lived.

Durant, Mississippi, and Durant, Oklahoma were both named for members of our family. The story of the Durant family is absolutely fascinating, and as much as I have discovered so far, can be found here on these pages. I know there is more to find, and I'm still looking!

Marcus Newton Rogers married my mother, Dora Frances McClure, in 1936, in Ada, Oklahoma. Two years later on August 15, 1938, I (Marcia May Rogers), was born. Two years afterward on July 2, 1940, my sister, Sarah Kay Rogers, was born; two years after that, my brother Everett Ray Rogers was born in Tucson, Arizona, the town we had moved to. My parents were divorced less than a year after Everett's birth, and I never saw my father again. My mother did not want him to have contact with us, so she moved until he and his family could no longer locate us.

Sometime in the year or two following their divorce, my father moved to Texas. He was driving a bus between Beaumont and Houston when he met his second wife. They were married by 1945, and my brother Reginald Marcus Rogers was born September 8, 1946. Two years later, another son, Rick, was born, and then in 1956, my sister Charlotte Rhea Rogers was born.

Our father died in 1972, and we were not able to find one another before that happened. It is only now, as I begin to learn what he was like, that I truly know what I missed. He was always just a shadow to me, because I didn't know anything about him. My mother refused to talk about him for so long that she forgot most of what she had known. My brother Rick, the middle child my father had from his second marriage, died within a month of my father, I missed seeing him, too. For information about our father's burial, go here.

Photo above: Charlotte and our father. Photo right: Charlotte and Reggie, my "new" brother and sister!

My father's sister, Lucille, was about two years younger than he. Lucille had four daughters, but she died also, in 1975. On the left is a photo of her daughters and their children. Her mother, Minnie (my grandmother) is gone, and so is my grandfather, Reginald Rhea Rogers. There is much we missed learning from all of them. However, there is a lot of good information on the internet about the Choctaw Nation, the Indian Territory that became Oklahoma, and the Choctaw while they were in their ancestral lands of Mississippi. There were, and are Choctaw groups elsewhere, but we came from Mississippi. The story of these people... the Choctaw who married into two families: The first is the Durant family, headed by Louis Durant, a French Canadian who introduced cattle to them, and was a very interesting person, as was his son, Pierre Durant. The other family name is Folsom, and the stories of the Folsom family, which is traced all through American history with distinction reaches back even further than John Folsom who emigrated in 1638 from England; to Nathaniel⁵ (meaning, of the fifth generation) Folsom, who settled in Mississippi and opened a trading post, married two Choctaw princesses, and proceeded to sire 24 children. Of these came Choctaw chiefs, leaders, preachers, and many men who distinguished themselves during their lifetimes. These families and others are where our family comes from, and on our history pages I will try to provide you with just some of the interesting information about them. I have been fascinated ever since I began this journey, because it is not one that has been made up. This is the story of my family; where they came from, and how they went from there, to the place where we are now.

We are picking up people all along the way, and I think that is just wonderful. Our families are very special, and are something that should be treasured throughout our lives.

I will also provide a list of links to just about any information about the Choctaw Nation that you would wish for, and a list of personal pages also done by other Choctaw.

Photo above: Cousin Bobbe, her sisters, her children and all of their families at a recent reunion.

I hope you will stay with me as I travel these trails, and relive the experiences that my people have lived.

Yakoke - the Choctaw word for Thank you!

On to the Rogers Lineage...

Back to the Choctaw List...

Back to the Family pages list...

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Page created March 26, 2002