BARTOW COUNTY, Ga.\u00a0\u2013\u00a0\u201cWofford\u2019s Blood\u201d is a novel about the Wofford family, a Cherokee family living in north Georgia in the early 1800s.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Written by Donna Coffey Little,\u00a0the story focuses on James Daughtery Wofford. Also known as J.D. Wofford, who is likely most known in Cherokee history as an assistant to Tsuwaluka, a detachment leader on the Trail of Tears.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n \u201cWofford\u2019s Blood\u201d is a novel by Donna Coffey Little about the Wofford family, a Cherokee family living in north Georgia in the early 1800s.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI live in what is now Bartow County, Georgia, right down the street from a little town that used to be called Wofford\u2019s Crossroads, Georgia,\u201d Coffey said. \u201cAnd I always wondered who these Woffords were, and when I started digging into it I realized that the Woffords were an inter-married white and Cherokee family. Some of them, including J.D. Woffard, went on the Trail (of Tears) to Oklahoma. A few of them stayed here although later a lot of their children and grandchildren also ended up going out to Oklahoma, but it is really the story of this place and the people who lived here.\u201d<\/p>\n Coffey added she had a lot of surprises while putting together the book.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that surprised me the most is that I\u2019ve tracked down a lot of the (Wofford) descendants, some Cherokee descendants, also some African American descendants. There are actually some Cherokee Freedmen who are Woffords,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are a lot of Cherokee Woffords, but one of the things that surprised me the most was I tracked down some descendants of a few of the family members who had stayed here and they had still been in touch with their cousins out in Oklahoma as recently as their grandparents\u2019 generation. That surprised me because I would have thought there would have been no contact.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then another thing that surprised me is among the African American Woffords, Toni Morrison (noted American novelist), was actually born Chloe Wofford and her father George Wofford was an enslaved person owned by a branch of the same Wofford family.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n While researching the book, Coffey also learned J.D. Wofford was one of the main sources of information for Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney\u2019s book \u201cCherokee History, Myths and Sacred Formulas,\u201d which is still read and used today by Cherokee people to study their culture and history.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, J.D. Wofford was actually Mooney\u2019s main informant. You can just look in the (book) index, but also if you go on Project Gutenberg and find the learning book, the electronic version, and search there are a couple 100 references to things that J.D. Wofford told him,\u201d she explained. \u201cOne of my big questions, too, is how did J.D. Wofford become the sort of repository of all of this information? So, then I was just kind of like a detective trying to reconstruct his life, and there are a lot of historical clues, but he\u2019s been kind of forgotten. So, I think that was one of my purposes, too, was to bring him back into people\u2019s memory.\u201d<\/p>\n Coffey said\u00a0\u201cWofford’s Blood\u201d\u00a0is going to be a series.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSo, I\u2019m actually working now on book two, and if I live long enough, there\u2019s going to be probably four or five, because I meant to get J.D. on the Trail of Tears in book one. But at the end of book one he\u2019s only 13 years old. I really want to understand who he was and how he became who he was,\u201d she said. \u201cBook two is about the 1820s and 1830s, so basically his role in building the Cherokee Nation and then resisting removal and then ultimately going on the trail.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Coffey said she wants to visit Oklahoma to meet some of the Cherokee descendants of J.D. Wofford that she has corresponded with but hasn\u2019t met in person.<\/p>\n She added another purpose for writing the book was to restore Cherokee history in Georgia, which she believes has been largely erased from the state. A majority of Cherokee removed, about 8,000-9,000 people, were moved from Georgia in 1838.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn recent decades, there\u2019s been a little bit of effort to restore that (history) but not enough, in my opinion. And so, part of my purpose in writing the book is to kind of restore that memory, both for the people who live here in north Georgia and what was the Cherokee Nation, and then for Cherokee folks to know more about what it was like for their ancestors who were here in north Georgia before the removal,\u201d she said. \u201cI mean, this really was the heart of things. Other than the New Echota (State Historic Site), and a few other places, it\u2019s just completely erased here.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I\u2019ve seen with my book is that there are a lot of people in north Georgia who are very hungry, actually, to know this history. So, I mean, hopefully we can begin to restore that a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n The book can be purchased at Amazon or directly from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.cherokeephoenix.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BARTOW COUNTY, Ga.\u00a0\u2013\u00a0\u201cWofford\u2019s Blood\u201d is a novel about the Wofford family, a Cherokee family living in north Georgia in the early 1800s.\u00a0 Written by Donna Coffey Little,\u00a0the story focuses on James Daughtery Wofford. Also known as J.D. Wofford, who is likely most known in Cherokee history as an assistant to Tsuwaluka, a detachment leader on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2104158,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[341174,341177,398059,398057,377676,398058,25432],"class_list":["post-2104157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-cherokee","tag-indigenous-peoples-of-north-america","tag-indigenous-peoples-of-the-southeastern-woodlands","tag-new-echota","tag-toni-morrison","tag-trail-of-tears","tag-united-states"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Cherokee-family-from-northern-Georgia-the-focus-of-\u2018Woffords-Blood.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2104157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2104159,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104157\/revisions\/2104159"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2104158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2104157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2104157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2104157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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