Elvis Presley Family Facts

Elvis' Maternal Heritage

Elvis' maternal heritage through to his mother, Gladys

Elvis' great-great-great-grandmother, Morning White Dove (1800-1835), was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian.
She married William Mansell, a settler in western Tennessee, in 1818. William's father, Richard Mansell, had been a soldier in the Revolutionary War.
Mansell is a French name--its literal translation is the man from Le Mans. The Mansells migrated from Norman France to Scotland, and then later to Ireland.
In the 18th century the family came to the American Colonies. The appellation 'white' in Morning Dove's name refers to her status as a friendly Indian.
Early American settlers called peaceable Indians 'white', while 'red' was the designation for warring Indians or those who sided with the British in the Revolutionary War. It was common for male settlers in the West to marry 'white' Indians as there was a scarcity of females on the American frontier.

Like many young men in the American Southwest, William Mansell fought with Andrew Jackson in the Indian Wars of the early nineteenth century. He fought with Old Hickory in Alabama, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, and later in Florida too. Returning to Tennessee from the Indian Wars, William Mansell married Morning White Dove.
Elaine Dundy says of the marriage, William Mansell gained 'age-old Indian knowledge of the American terrain; of forests and parries; of crops and game; of protection against the climate; of medicine lore, healing plants as well as something in which the Indians were expert--the setting of broken bones'. Moreover, added to Elvis' lineage were Morning White Dove's ruddy Indian complexion and fine line of cheek.

Like many other settlers, the newlyweds migrated to Alabama from Tennessee to claim lands garnered in the Indian Wars.
The Mansells settled in Marion County in northeast Alabama near the Mississippi border.

Elvis' great-great grandfather

Morning White Dove and William Mansell prospered in Alabama.
Their land was fertile and they built a substantial house near the town of Hamilton.
They had three offspring, the eldest of who was John Mansell, born in 1828, and Elvis' great-great grandfather.

Elvis' great grandfather

John Mansell squandered the legacy of the family farm.
In 1880 he abdicated to Oxford, Mississippi, changing his name to Colonel Lee Mansell.
His sons left Hamilton to seek their fortunes in the town of Saltillo, Mississippi, near Tupelo, the birth place of Elvis Presley.
The third of John Mansell's sons, White Mansell, became the patriarch of the family with John Mansell's removal to Oxford.
White Mansell was Elvis' great- grandfather.

White Mansell married Martha Tackett, a neighbour in Saltillo.
Of-note is the religion, Jewish, of Martha's mother, Nancy Tackett.
It was unusual to find a Jewish settler in Mississippi during this time.
All accounts point to White Mansell as a hard-working, upright, provider for a clan increasingly besieged by economic factors beyond their control.
The Civil War fractured the Southern economy and soul.
Cotton, the backbone of the South, was subject to financial depressions such as the Panic of 1890.

After the devastation of Civil War, like many other Southern families, the Mansells were stretched to the breaking point.
They sold their lands and became sharecroppers.
The prosperity of the South, along with the fortunes of the family, had plummeted.
However the life of a sharecropper was not unremittingly grim.
They had music and dancing and the comfort of religion.
Tenant farmers, sharecroppers, were often invited to the owner's house on Saturday nights for square dancing and parties.
Sundays there were picnics on the ground after church.
Although there was little hope of escaping poverty, it was a life of community with some gayety.