Census cards & application jackets

The census card (the "enrollment card")

One card per household, kept by the commission as the working record. A typical card shows:

• every household member with age, sex, and degree of blood (or I.W.),
• relationships to the head of household,
• parents' names and their enrollment status — often reaching a generation further back than the rolls themselves,
• references to earlier tribal rolls (1880, 1896, and others) the commission used as evidence,
• post office, residence, and clerks' annotations — transfers, deaths, decisions.

Cards carry the marks of process: stamps, strike-throughs, margin notes dated years apart. Read everything; the annotations are often the genealogy.

The application jacket

The case file behind the card: transcribed interviews and testimony, affidavits from relatives and neighbors, birth affidavits for new borns, attorneys' correspondence, and the commission's decision documents. Jackets vary — some hold two pages, some hold eighty. Where the family's jacket is digitized, we link it from the card view.

If the card is the index entry, the jacket is the story. When an ancestor's voice survives anywhere in federal records, it's usually here — in their own answers to the commission's questions.

Viewing the originals — free

Every record we index is digitized by the U.S. National Archives and viewable free on the National Archives Catalog (catalog.archives.gov), no account needed. Our result pages deep-link straight to the right document. You can download full-resolution scans from NARA directly. (We host no scans ourselves — you always read the primary source on the government's own site.)

Citing what you find

A solid citation names the record set and the identifiers, e.g.: "Enrollment card for Choctaw by Blood, Card #612 — Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75 (M1186), National Archives, NAID 218545546." Each Native Past record view shows its NAID so your citations can point exactly where you found it.

The record sets on this site — and where each one takes you

Dawes-era research quickly leads beyond the census cards and jackets. Every record set below that we index has its own search section — click through from here.

The Dawes Rolls (1898–1914)

The census cards, application jackets, and final-roll entries this guide describes — 181,629 people across the five nations, including the parents named on every card. Search the Dawes Rolls →

The printed Final Rolls (1907/1914, NARA T529)

The approved lists themselves — typed, approved by the Secretary of the Interior, and bound. The roll number on a census card points into these volumes; ages there were recalculated to a fixed cutoff date, which is why a person can look a few years older on the roll than on their card. There's no separate search for the volumes — instead, a Dawes record with a roll number offers its official roll page image directly in the record view.

Guion Miller applications (Eastern Cherokee, 1906–09)

A separate process from Dawes: after the Court of Claims ruled for the Eastern Cherokee in 1905, special agent Guion Miller took 45,847 applications — roughly 90,000 people across the country — to distribute the judgment fund (NARA M1104, series 301643). Applications list parents, grandparents, and siblings; many applicants also appear on the Dawes Rolls. Search the Guion Miller applications →

California Indians enrollment applications (1928–33)

Applications under the California Indians Jurisdictional Act of 1928, taken statewide for the judgment-fund rolls. Search the California applications →

The 1896 applications and their case files (Five Tribes)

A first round of citizenship applications taken in 1896 and later set aside — but the files survive, and Dawes jackets often cite them ("see 1896 case…"). A rejection in 1896 did not bar a later Dawes application. Search the 1896 applications by number → · the "Mary Martin" case files → · the Freedmen-to-By-Blood transfer cases →

Agency records from other nations

The same Archives bulk data describes person-level records far beyond the Five Tribes — we add each set as it qualifies: Turtle Mountain family data cards, 1906–10 → · Sisseton Agency children's card index, 1923–30 → · Northern Cheyenne home surveys, 1924 →

Cited but not (yet) searchable here

Tribal enrollments on the cards (1880, 1896, and others): the "Tribal Enrollment — Year / Town / No." columns cite the nations' own earlier rolls, separate record sets at the Archives. Land allotment applications: the original paper files (about 1,100 linear feet) are held by the Archives and are not yet free in its online catalog — they'll join this site when the Archives publishes them.

One caution that protects your research: these record sets number people independently. A Dawes roll number, a census card number, a Miller application number, and an 1896 case number are all different sequences — when a document cites a number, note which roll it belongs to.