Melungeon family
*On this date in 2012, a DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy was released.
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. Found mainly in the states of Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky, varied and sometimes wild claims have for years been made about these dark-skinned Appalachian residents once known as the Melungeons.
Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies. And that report, published earlier that year in a peer-reviewed journal, doesn't sit comfortably with some people claiming Melungeon ancestry. "There were a lot of people upset by this study," lead researcher Roberta Estes said. "They just knew they were Portuguese or Native American."
'Beginning in the early 1800s, or possibly before, the term Melungeon (meh-LUN'-jun) was applied as a slur to about 40 families along the Tennessee-Virginia border. But it has since become a catchall phrase for several groups of mysterious mixed-race ancestry. In recent decades, interest in the origin of the Melungeons has risen dramatically with advances in DNA research and the advent of Internet resources that allow individuals to trace their ancestry without digging through dusty archives.
G. Reginald Daniel, a sociologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara who's spent more than 30 years examining multiracial people in the U.S. and wasn't part of this research, said the study is more evidence that race-mixing in the U.S. isn't a new phenomenon. "All of us are multiracial," he said. "It is recapturing a more authentic U.S. history." Estes and her fellow researchers theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung from the unions of Black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s, before slavery. They conclude that as laws were enacted to penalize the mixing of races, the various family groups could only intermarry with each other, even migrating together from Virginia through the Carolinas before settling primarily in the mountains of East Tennessee.
According to the study's authors, claims of Portuguese ancestry likely were a ruse they used to remain free and retain other privileges that came with being considered white. The study quotes an 1874 court case in Tennessee in which a Melungeon woman's inheritance was challenged. If Martha Simmerman were found to have African blood, she would lose the inheritance. Her attorney, Lewis Shepherd, argued successfully that the Simmerman family was descended from ancient Phoenicians who eventually migrated to Portugal and North America. Writing about his argument in a memoir published years later, Shepherd stated, "Our Southern high-bred people will never tolerate on equal terms any person who is even remotely tainted with negro blood, but they do not make the same objection to other brown or dark-skinned people, like the Spanish, the Cubans, the Italians, etc."
In another lawsuit in 1855, Jacob Perkins, who is described as "an East Tennessean of a Melungeon family," sued a man who had accused him of having "negro blood." In a note to his attorney, Perkins wrote why he felt the accusation was damaging. Writing in the era of slavery ahead of the American Civil War, Perkins noted the racial discrimination of the age: "1st the words imply that we are liable to be indicted (equals) liable to be whipped (equals) liable to be fined." Later generations came to believe some of the tales their ancestors wove out of necessity.
Jack Goins, who has researched Melungeon history for about 40 years and was the driving force behind the DNA study, said his distant relatives were listed as Portuguese on an 1880 census. Yet he was taken aback when he first had his DNA tested around 2000. Swabs from his cheeks collected the genetic material from saliva or skin cells, and the sample was sent to a laboratory for identification. "It surprised me so much when mine came up African that I had it done again," he said. "I had to have a second opinion. But it came back the same way. I had three done. They were all the same."
To conduct the larger DNA study, Goins and his fellow researchers who are genealogists but not academics, had to define who was a Melungeon. Recently, it has become a catchall term for people of mixed-race ancestry. It has been applied to about 200 communities in the eastern U.S., from New York to Louisiana, most African and Native American. Among them were the Montauks, the Mantinecocks, Van Guilders, the Clappers, the Shinnecocks, and others in New York. Pennsylvania had the Pools; in North Carolina, the Lumbees, Waccamaws, and Haliwas, and South Carolina, the Redbones, Buckheads, Yellowhammers, Creels, and others.
In Louisiana, which somewhat resembled a Latin American nation with its racial mixing, there were Creoles of the Cane River region and the Redbones of western Louisiana, among others. The latest DNA study limited participants to those whose families were called Melungeon in the historical records of the 1800s and early 1900s in and around Tennessee's Hawkins and Hancock Counties, on the Virginia border some 200 miles northeast of Nashville. The study does not rule out the possibility of other races or ethnicities forming part of the Melungeon heritage, but none were detected among the 69 male and 8 female lines tested. Also, the study did not look for later racial mixing that might have occurred, for instance, with Native Americans.
Goins estimates several thousand descendants of the historical Melungeons are still living today, but the study only examined unbroken male and female lines. The origin of the word Melungeon is unknown, but white residents in Appalachia who suspected the families of being mixed race considered it a slur. "It's sometimes embarrassing to see the lengths your ancestors went to hide their African heritage, but look at the consequences," said Wayne Winkler, past president of the Melungeon Heritage Association. The DNA study is ongoing as researchers continue to locate additional Melungeon descendants.
Associated Press Writer, Cain Burdeau contributed to this story from New Orleans, La.
