There are many Americans who have
never heard of a Melungeon. Even among
Melungeons themselves, as a people who constitute a unique demographic group in
the diverse fabric of American society and culture, it can be challenging to
find two who agree on exactly what a Melungeon is. So how do we fairly define Melungeons? Speaking
to the Smyth County Genealogical Society on March 22, 2016, Judge Isaac Freeman
asked, “Where have all the purebred Melungeons gone?” The judge let his audience know that it was
just a rhetorical joke because “there is no such thing as a ‘purebred’
Melungeon.” There seems to be no objective way for a
person to clearly and cleanly define Melungeons and therefore it is nearly
impossible to find a definition that satisfies everyone. Dictionary.com defines a Melungeon as “a
member of a people of mixed white, black and Native American ancestry living in
the southern Appalachians.” That lone definition stated in a room with 10
Melungeons would spark a debate yielding 10 more definitions that differed from
the original. A look at Webster’s
Dictionary would yield similar results. Melungeons are frequently referred to
as a “tri-racial isolate people”, according to Donald N.
Yates and Elizabeth C. Hirschman in their well-researched article for the Appalachian
Journal. While in truth, Melungeons are a mixed-race
group of people, they are endlessly more fascinating and complex than a simple
definition can explain. And they are a
much more interesting group genetically or culturally than the phrase
“tri-racial isolate group” can encompass. They are a group of people with a
rich heritage on the North American continent, even going back to a time that
pre-dates Jamestown in 1607 and possibly including descendants of the Lost
Colony of Roanoke of 1585. Coupled with
genome projects that substantiate a heritage based on DNA discoveries revealing
ancestry from pre-Columbian Native Americans as well as African Americans,
Melungeons can also claim Spanish, Portuguese, British, Northern European, Turkish,
and North African blood. More recent
studies have revealed a Jewish ancestry for some Melungeons from both the
Sephardic Jews and the Ashkenazi group from Eastern Europe. The story of the origins of the Melungeons
continue to unfold as more research is done.
We do know that their history in America is as long as any one European
group can claim.
The more recent DNA studies have added to the complexity of any attempt
to conclusively define exactly what a Melungeon is and at the same time confirm
many oral traditions from the Melungeon people themselves, as well as the
documentable, historic record. For
example, many Melungeons since the mid 1600’s have claimed a descent from Portuguese
people. One article reported that,
Now a new DNA study in the
journal of Genetic Genealogy attempts to separate truth from oral tradition and
wishful thinking. The study found the
truth to be somewhat less exotic:
Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons
are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central
European origin.
This article further stated,
Claims of Portuguese
ancestry likely were a ruse they used in order to remain free and retain other
privileges that came with being considered white, according to the study’s authors.
Not only do these statements
validate the idea of the oral tradition of the Melungeons claiming to be of
Portuguese ancestry, they illuminate the bias that some research about the
group has taken. It should be noted,
that both cultural and racial bias is a large component of the Melungeon story,
dating back to the early mid 1600’s. Other DNA studies completely reject the
idea that claims by Melungeons of being Portuguese are false. The evidence in another DNA study clearly illustrates
this point. Yates and Hirschman point out
in their study that,
the Appalachian people known
as Melungeons were not primarily drawn from the ancestries in Northwestern
Europe but represent an amalgam of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, North
African, Sub-Saharan African, and Native American ethnic groups.
Yates and Hirschman also readily
admit that their work was not comprehensive, as they explain that “Because our
study is based on a sample of 40 persons,” Although their work was based on a small
sampling of people, their analysis was objective and scholarly, and they cite
references to James Guthrie who analyzed blood samples from 177 Southern
Appalachian Melungeons. At the conclusion of their article, they claim,
The results are
consistent—to a remarkable degree—with those in the present study. The leading matches found by Guthrie were Libya
(North Africa), the Canary Islands (settled by the Spanish and Portuguese),
Malta (a Mediterranean island population having Spanish, Italian, Portuguese
and Arab ancestry), Portugal, Veneto (Italy), Ireland, Cyprus (an island off
the coast of Lebanon, and Galatia (Spain).
With the exception of matches to Gypsy populations (which were not
available to him), Guthrie’s matches are quite consistent with our results.
Of particular interest in this
paper was a graphic (labeled Figure 2) which revealed the DNA results of one
specific participant of the study. The
DNA composition of the individual was ranked from highest to lowest, weighted
on global DNA data. In descending order
this participant’s ancestry was listed as
1. Portuguese, 2. Michigan
Native American, 3. Rwandan (Hutu), 4. Rwandan (Tutsi), 5. Brazilian Caucasian,
6. Belgian (Flemish), 7. African American, 8. Black Ecuadorian 9. Lumbee
(Native American), 10. Hispanic, 11. Florida African American
and so on through 20. Also included
in the plethora of genetic backgrounds, in descending order were Native
American, Moroccan Arabs, Azores, Caucasian, Serbian, Bhutia (India), Tibet
(Luoba) Libyan and Argentinean. All
forty of the participants included in the study claimed Melungeon heritage as a
prerequisite. This particular individual
is a good example of why the commonly used description of Melungeons as
“tri-racial isolates”, found over and over again in stories, newspaper articles
and journals are limited in scope as well as being overly simplistic. As much
as the different DNA studies seem to disagree based on sampling sizes and other
study parameters, they tend to be of one accord on one point; they all reveal
the cultural/racial backgrounds of Melungeons to be very diverse. It is that
unique diversity that makes them intriguing to study. Their diversity within a single and
previously solitary group makes the story of Melungeons atypically
representative of all Americans.
So how can one make some sense of all the conflicting approaches and
reports of the DNA studies and begin to categorize this complex group? How can one gain some clarity and start to
define the Melungeons? While sometimes
unable to paint a complete picture, History does shed some light on what it
truly means to be a Melungeon. There are
historical markers shedding light on the story across the centuries that
comprise the narrative of the Melungeons in the History of the Americas.
According to one source, the historical record is just as duplicitous and
perhaps even as speculative, as has been discovered from the multiple DNA
studies conducted.
Most families in
the Southern part of North America in some way have family roots to the
Melungeons. So, let’s start from the beginning. Where did the Melungeons come
from? That is a good question. Some call the Melungeons the "Lost
People" or the "Mysterious" people of Appalachia. There are a
lot of stories of where the Melungeons came from. I will try to explain a few.
They say that they are descended from the "Lost Colony of Roanoke"
who married into the local Native American tribes. Others say that they were
descendants of Welsh explorer Modoc who came to North America around 1100 AD,
with ten ships of colonists. Still others say that Melungeons are the lost
tribe of Israel, lost Spanish explores(sp) and just simply a "tri -racial
isolate, made up of Native American/ African American/Caucasian mixture.” But
then there are those that say they were Portuguese.
This quote is representative of
hundreds of web sites that have been developed during the last 30 years,
specifically targeting the subject of Melungeons and who they are. The popularity of Melungeons as a group has
risen proportionally with the growth of the internet. Individual amateur historians, genealogy
students, history buffs and any assortment of lay people search and contribute
to the story of Melungeons as readily as scholars, academics and professional
writers who publish books on the subject.
Discovering the past for all of them seems to be equally murky. Staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal,
Fred R. Bleakly confirmed this with the opening sentence of an article he wrote
titled, “Appalachian Clan Mines Web Sites for Ancestral Clues”, stating that “Descendants
of a dwindling clan of Appalachians are seeking its long-buried roots in
cyberspace.” Regardless
of motive, a lot of people are digging up the past and with this “new” evidence
defining the Melungeon culture, it has now become hip to find some Melungeons
in the old family tree.
One can trace recent Melungeon
popularity to the play “Walk Toward the Sunset”. According to a Melungeon named Toby D. Gibson,
The play ‘Walk Toward the
Sunset,’ written by renowned playwright Kermit Hunter told the story of the
Melungeon people and brought a sense of pride to the Melungeons and to the
local community. The play ran on and off
from July 3, 1969 through 1976 and was performed before thousands of people
each season. Tourists from around the
country would venture to the mountains to hear the story of the mysterious Melungeons. Today annual events that we call Melungeon
Unions are held in Vardy Valley to celebrate the families and heritage of the
Melungeons.
Another factor in the recent
popularizing of Melungeon culture was a book published in 1994 by another
Melungeon named N. Brent Kennedy. His story is a very compelling one and his
book could best be described as more of an autobiography than anything else. His introduction states,
This is the story of my
family, and by way of tangled kinship, many other families with roots on the
Cumberland Plateau of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, West Virginia and Tennessee. But more important, in a very real way it is
also the story of a people. A people ravaged and nearly destroyed, by the
senseless excesses of racism and genocide.
Where Kennedy’s story really gets
interesting is his telling of
exactly how he discovers his
Melungeon roots. Kennedy’s book is a personal quest of discovery for him, so at
times, the reader can get bogged down in the details of his genealogical
research, which cite hundreds of surnames, common to the Appalachian
region. However, it is a good starting
point for any interested researcher because the story is indicative of
thousands more. Kennedy’s story is
unique because his personal quest began with a life-threatening illness which
revealed an unknown heritage. Kennedy
explained,
I lay on the examination
table, the cold steel numbing my half-draped posterior, but in so much pain
that a little lack of feeling was welcomed relief. Whatever I had contracted had grown
progressively worse over the past several days, so much worse, in fact, that I
could not walk into the hospital emergency room on my own accord. Instead, my wife had literally pulled me from
the car to a waiting wheelchair and then pushed me the final few yards. Several years of puzzling exhaustion had
suddenly erupted into swelling of my extremities, painful breathing, splotched,
reddened skin, aching joints and muscles, blurred vision, a searing
temperature, and horrible night sweats that left me drenched.
The doctor who was on duty at the
hospital that day presented a good news, bad news scenario to Kennedy. He was informed he was fortunate that he did
not have Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, however, he probably did have erythema
nodosum sarcoidosis, a disease for which there is no known cure and for which
science has yet to discover the exact cause.
What is known about the disease is that it is “primarily an
African-American and Mediterranean disease.” When Kennedy was a child, growing up, he had
been told of a Scotch/Irish heritage. He
had wondered about the physical contrast between his cousins, some of whom were
of fair complexion, with light colored skin and hair, and yet he and his mother
had more of a copper colored skin and dark black hair. As his disease started to go into remission,
Kennedy speculated, “Why did so many members of our family have a decidedly
Mediterranean appearance?” Kennedy was later to find out that the same
sarcoidosis from which he suffered was also common to people in New England,
who had ancestors from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal). He wrote
that
As I clawed my way into the
closets of our family history, I uncovered layer after layer of purposeful
deceit, a veritable diary of self-imposed exile from the land of the
living. We had always been on the run,
dreading each door that would close in our face until we conditioned ourselves
to avoid all doors…We were Melungeons, a word I had seldom heard growing up,
but as I soon learned, a word that would cut to the very heart of our
problematic history…They and we were ‘free persons of color,’ or simply ‘FPC’
as the early census takers had coined in shorthand. And being ‘FPC’ was the ultimate sin, a
stigma that permanently isolated its victim from the rest of socalled
civilization. Neither white, black, mulatto, nor Indian, the Melungeons were
left to find for themselves, a people who were as numerous writers have so
often stated, ‘nobody at all.
In his decades long quest of self-discovery,
Kennedy learned a great deal about himself, but more importantly, his was the
spark that ignited a blaze of discovery for thousands of others. His book was
one of the earliest to suggest some of the theories still being discussed
today, as to the origins of the Melungeons.
The first documentation of the Melungeons by the English occurred very
early in the nation’s history. One
article stated,
English explorers in 1654
described the people they discovered in the Appalachian Mountains as being ‘dark-skinned,
reddish-brown complexioned’ with fine European features. In 1673, Englishmen James Needham and Gabrial
Arthur, along with eight Native Americans, began exploring what later became
the Tennessee Valley…The Melungeons claimed they were descended from a group of
‘Portyghee’ who had been shipwrecked and abandoned on the Atlantic coast.
The same article also explained,
The Melungeons, having
evolved into European, Native American and African ancestry, settled in
isolated mountain communities, among them Newman’s Ridge in Hancock Col TN and
Stone and Coeburn mountains in VA. In
the 1690’s, French explorers reported finding ‘Christianized Moors’ in the
Carolina mountains…Speaking broken Elizabethan English, they called themselves ‘Portyghee’
or the more mysterious term ‘Melungeon.
Confining and isolating themselves to the geographical area where
Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky and West Virginia merge, Melungeons
remain a mysterious group of people. The
difficulty of reaching parts of that region of the Appalachians has served the
Melungeon people as a protective buffer from the rest of American culture. In response to the racism the Melungeons
first encountered in the mid 1600’s and later, the documenting of them as “FPC”
(free persons of color) in the 1790 Census, a strategy evolved for their path
moving forward to today. As much as was
possible, the Melungeons had as little to do with the rest of society as
possible. It has only been in recent
years that research, curiosity and the Melungeons discovering their own past
has shed a new light on their culture and is still creating a new narrative for
this mysterious group of people called the Melungeons. Elizabeth Hirschman sums it up well at the
close of her book, “Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America. Hisrschman writes,
I do not believe we are a
victimized minority group. In the past, some of our Melungeon ancestors were
mistreated, harassed, and even killed.
But we, the present generation
are distantly removed from this and to position ourselves as racially
persecuted is simply wrong…It is in revitalizing (or as cousin Brent would put
it, resurrecting) this culture that our ethnic future lies. Let’s get going!
Bibliography
Hirschman,
Elizabeth C. Melungeons, The Last Lost
Tribe in America. Macon, Georgia:
Mercer University Press, 2005.
Mira, Manuel. The Forgotten Portuguese. Franklin,
North Carolina: The Portuguese-American Historical Research Foundation, Inc.,1998.
Hashaw, Tim. Children of Perdition. Macon, Georgia
USA: 2006.
Winkler, Wayne. Walking Toward The Sunset. Macon,
Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2004.
Kennedy, N.
Brent with Robyn Vaughan Kennedy. The Melungeons
The Resurrection of a Proud People. Macon, Georgia USA, 1994.
Schrift,
Melissa. Becoming Melungeon, Making an
Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South. Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 2003.
Lively Roots, “A genealogy and anecdotal
history of the Lively Family and their many relationships”, “Origins of the
Melungeons”, http://www.livelyroots.com/things/melung.htm, Accessed Feb 14,
2017.
