My tribe is headquartered in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

The 1800's location of the tribe was the St. Joseph River Valley in southern Michigan and northern Indiana. That is where Joseph Bertrand, a French trader, married Madelein Bourassa, reputedly the daughter of Chief Topenebee of the Potawatomi tribe. Their 7th child, Julia Bertrand, married Alva Higbee, formerly of Mexico, NY and of primarily English heritage. The Higbee side of the family tracks back to early 1600's in England. The ghost town of Bertrand, Michigan is named after Joseph Bertrand.

The Higbee family was not a part of the Potawatomi "Trail of Death" during the Indian removal of 1838:

https://www.potawatomi.org/culture/trail-of-death 

Alva and Julia were married in Bertrand in 1848 and moved to St. Mary's Kansas in 1851, among the last of the tribe to do so.

In the late 1800's the Citizen Band of the tribe choose to move to "Indian Territory" ...Oklahoma.. where they were provided with individual land allotments in contrast to the Prairie Band, who chose to stay at the reservation at St. Mary's, Kansas.

My paternal great grandfather (Lewis Benjamin) made that move and received an allotment of 240 acres. The town was known as Higbee, until he sold a portion of the allotment to a person named Corbett; sometime thereafter the town's name changed. A church still sits on that land as well as a cemetery.

My father was born in Lexington, Oklahoma. His childhood was spent mostly in Norman and Bristow, Oklahoma.

He was good student and athlete, excelling in wrestling. He decided to go to college and with the offer of a job at Michigan State College, he hitch-hiked to East Lansing, Michigan to start school. WWII intervened and he served in the Army Air Force as a bombardier pilot trainer. He returned to college on the GI Bill and finished with a Master's degree in Public Administration (Political Science) in 1950.

He (Homer) and my mother, Marguerite (Peggy) Hazen met at college and married as dad headed off to the military. They had three children, me (1943), Thomas (1945) and Marjory Jo (1952).

I am the keeper of the family genealogy.