Posted on 02/12/2005 9:52:39 AM PST by Engraved-on-His-hands
For more than 200 hundred years the mysterious origins of the Melungeons has mystified many who were searching for facts. Recent research compiled by the Melungeon Research Committee (MRS) reveals the most probable theory thus far.
(Excerpt) Read more at zwire.com ...
I read that a group travelled to the eastern part of Viriginia in the early 1600's and discovered a village settled by whites. The homes had windows and oval shaped doors. Several times a day the people met in the center of town for prayer. When asked who they were they said they were "Portagee". This place is called Wise county today and from what I understand there are Melungeons still living there.
yes there are, and in the tri-cities area too. some of the people are strikingly attractive, with dark skin, dark hair and blue eyes
Very interesting
The "brown people" of Appalachia have been in song and story for almost four centuries now, and the unique culture that grew out of these folk (actually consisting of quite a few different strains) constitutes the "bluegrass" heritage.
And yet, they seem to be getting rediscovered all the time. When the Tennessee Valley Authority was plotting out land in the 1930's to build power dams in Tennessee and Kentucky, they kept discovering pockets of these people who still spoke an Elizabethan English and were almost totally illiterate.
This is really fascinating. I love this explanation of Melungeon origins. But in an age of DNA, I don't see why the origins of a group like this should even be a question. Surely it is possible to identify them without much technical difficulty and determine their genetic background?
Excluding present company, Melungeons are surely the most interesting community on the internet. And the sweetest :-)
I was in the Greenville/Spartanburg area of SC and would have sworn the waitresses were Brits -- but they weren't......
Interesting story. Thanks for the post.
FYI
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I don't know what a "Melungeons" is.
I'd prefer to keep it a mystery.
Sounds like some Pacific Islander's body parts.
;-)
You are correct that Melungeons still live in Wise County in Southwest Virginia. I personally know several and, in contrast to the typical Appalachian descendants of 18th century Scots-Irish and German settlers, they are dark, graceful, and very Mediterranean looking. Their compelling story as a distinctive people is an interesting foray into ethnohistory and is worthy of further study. Thanks for posting this article...
Fascinating
The best source of information are the works of N. Brent Kennedy, formerly of Wise Virginia where he was at the Clinch Valley Community College. He is now down south 60 miles in Kingsport, Tennessee.
He learned of his Melungeon heritage in an Atlanta GA hospital where he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder generally restricted to eastern Mediterranian people. The near brush with death set him to wondering...."who the hell am I?"
His works are fascinating to those of us who live here and have contact with the various Melungeon families in the area. They too are fascinated and are "Coming Out" There is now an annual gathering in Kingsport drawing hundreds who are interested in their heritage and genetic problems.
Although there are pockets of Melungeon folks in all the mountains of North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee, the primary redoubts were in the counties on the Clinch River in Tennessee.....Hancock and Claiborne. Across the river is Southwest Virginia and there are Melungeon families all up through there as well. The racially indeterminate people were severely persecuted and fled to the mountains and hollows where no one would bother them.
The gathering focuses attention on the heritage and the main certainty now is that the issue is quite complex. Melungeons are a mix of White, Negro and Indian blood. The white componant is genetically similar to some Portugeese people thought to be descended from North African Moorish people who settled there from Turkey.
There are academics in the past who have written extensively and now appear to be off base and naturlly want to defend themselves even if wrong. The current effort is quite extensive, both private and I think academic, and will result in a clearer and more accurate picture than is now available.
The family histories are being studied and once taboo secrets are being discussed in the light of day. One certainty is that these people have been here from the very beginning ie 1580's or so and are among the very earliest Americans. Some place them at Santa Elena (Beaufort SC) as early as 1566. The Lost Colony of Dare County NC is also widely thought to have produced Melungeon famalies.
Yep, I am up here in "God's Country," east Tennessee. I worked once with a mulungeon. They are very attractive.
Thanks for posting this article.
Mulignon – (Southern Italian dialect) – a black person, sometimes used in the same context as ..., kinda close, my step father blames the eggplant corruption on the Turks in Southern Italy, I am a Yankee we would have corrupted worst than that.
I'm sure more information will be available in the future with more DNA testing. This is very interesting.
Welcome to Free Republic. I'm not sure but what I may be part Melungeon. My ancestors were all around East Tenn. and my grandfather was half Creek Indian. I don't know what the rest of him was, LOL.
The conclusions verified the Mediterranean origins of the Melugeons. Specific regions mentioned as having populations with genetic markers consistent with the Melungeons included: Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Turkey, Cyprus, Malta, Canary Islands, extreme southern Italy, the Galician mountain region of Spain and Portugal, and certain South American Indians.
Abstract: Tennessee Anthropologist, published by the Tennessee Anthropological Association MELUNGEONS: COMPARISON OF GENE FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTIONS TO THOSE OF WORLDWIDE POPULATIONS. James L. Guthrie. XV(1):13-22. 1990.
"Worldwide gene frequency distributions in five major blood group systems were searched for similarity to those of the Melungeons. Calculations of the Mean Measure of Divergence (MMD) identified populations from the Mediterranean region and from coastal Europe that do not differ significantly from the Melungeons. All others, including Amerindians, differ widely. Hybridization with Indians or with Blacks is not required for the data to fit Mediterranean populations. However, if it is assumed that the Melungeons are basically English, a considerable black component is required. These results are consistent with the Melungeon tradition that they are Portuguese, and are in substantial agreement with the findings of Pollitzer and Brown, whose 1969 data provided the basis for the present calculations."
This statement from Brent Kennedy's The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People; An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America sums up the genetic data:
"I contend that the remnants of Joao (“Juan”) Pardo’s forts, joined by Portuguese refugees from Santa Elena, and possibly a few stray Dominicans and Jesuits, exiled Moorish French Huguenots, and escaped Acadians, along with [Sir Francis] Drake’s and perhaps other freed Turkish, Moorish, and Iberian captives, survived on these shores, combined forces over the ensuing years, moved to the hinterlands, intermarried with various Carolina and Virginia Native Americans, and eventually became the reclusive Melungeons."
Great post.
bump
Not an auspicious beginning, acronymically speaking ...
"The homes had windows and oval shaped doors."
Hobbits?
I remember reading about them in the Tennessee Blue Book in school. Of course that was in the 50's when we actually studied history.
I'm a grumpy old Tennessee curmudgeon but I appreciate the sentiment.
BTTT
The MRC believes these settlers came to the coast of South Carolina in 1567 under the leadership of a Spanish captain, Juan Pardo. The settlers consisted of approximately 250 soldiers, their wives and children.
(Kennedy's theory challenged the most commonly accepted theory of Melungeon origin: that they were Appalachian "tri-racial isolates," a mixture of "poor" whites, African slaves and "renegade" Native Americans -- the definition, in fact, attached to Melungeon in Webster's Third New International Dictionary as recently as 15 years ago.)
Just curious why they don't accept what was reported back in the 1600's. They said they were "Portuguee". That would seem to me to be more reliable than someone's theory in 1993.
Because the report came from the French?
...Deu 30:3 The Lord thy God will bring back again thy captivity, and will have mercy on thee, and gather thee again out of all the nations, into which he scattered thee before.
Deu 30:4 If thou be driven as far as the poles of heaven, the Lord thy God will fetch thee back from hence,
Deu 30:5 And will take thee to himself, and bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it: and blessing thee, he will make thee more numerous than were thy fathers.
Deu 30:6 The Lord thy God will circumcise thy heart, and the heart of thy seed: that thou mayst love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, that thou mayst live.
Deu 30:9 And the Lord thy God will make thee abound in all the works of thy hands,....thy land, and in the plenty of all things. For the Lord will return to rejoice over thee in all good things, as he rejoiced in thy fathers:
Not the French but I do know a copy of the report is available from the state of Virginia.
The French found them in 1690 in the western Carolina mountains, puzzling at their claim to be "Portyghee." And the Scotch-Irish settlers who moved down the Shenandoah Valley in the 1750s found them in the far reaches of southwestern Virginia and northeast Tennessee, pushing them farther into the Appalachians of northeast Tennessee and northwest North Carolina and laying claim to the fertile Melungeon valley land.
That's interesting. Thanks.
I never heard of them until today – that’s one of the reasons I like FR. Learn something new every day.
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oops, thanks again Solitas, is what I meant to do.
I their musical instrument of choice a banjo?
I have an aunt (born in Rockastle County, Kentucky) that I believe to be one of these people. She's very Portuguese-looking.
...zzzZZZzzz...zzzZZZz* huh? wha? :)
I guess "horror" is in the eye of the beholder (or in the opinion of the author)...
Sometimes it’s easier to make an assumption than to actually look into something.
Banjos belong to a family of instruments that are very old. Drums with strings stretched over them can be traced throughout the Far East, the Middle East and Africa almost from the beginning.
They can be played like the banjo, bowed or plucked like a harp depending on their development.
These instruments were spread, in "modern" times, to Europe through the Arab conquest of Spain, and the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.
The banjo, as we can begin to recognize it, was made by African slaves based on instruments that were indigenous to their parts of Africa. These early "banjos" were spread to the colonies of those countries engaged in the slave trade.
Scholars have found that many of these instruments have names that are related to the modern word "banjo", such as "banjar", "banjil", "banza", "bangoe", "bangie", "banshaw".
Some historians mention the diaries of Richard Jobson as the first record of the instrument.. While exploring the Gambra River in Africa in 1620 he recorded an instrument "...made of a great gourd and a neck, thereunto was fastened strings."
The first mention of the name for these instruments in the Western Hemisphere is from Martinique in a document dated 1678. It mentions slave gatherings where an instrument called the "banza" is used.
Further mentions are fairly frequent and documented. One such is quoted in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians from a poem by an Englishman in the British West Indies in 1763: "Permit thy slaves to lead the choral dance/To the wild banshaw's melancholy sound/".
The best known is probably that of Thomas Jefferson in 1781: "The instrument proper to them (i.e. the slaves) is the Banjar, which they brought hither from Africa."
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