View Single Post
Old May 25th, 2012 #2
Steven L. Akins
Banned
 
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: The Heart of Dixie
Posts: 13,170
Default

The likely background to the mixed-race families later to be called "Melungeons" was the emergence in the Chesapeake Bay region in the 17th century of what the historian Ira Berlin (1998) calls "Atlantic Creoles."

These were the descendants of unions of freed slaves (sometimes of mixed race) and indentured servants, who were primarily of English, Northern European and West African ancestry.

Some of these "Atlantic Creoles" in the charter generation in the colonies were culturally partly what today might be called "Hispanic" or "Latino", whose paternal ancestors had been Portuguese or Spanish men who had children with African women in African ports.

Their mixed-race descendants bore names such as "Chavez," "Rodriguez," and "Francisco," and the men often worked in the slave trade, some coming to the American colonies. Some mixed-race creoles intermarried with their English neighbors, adopted English surnames, and owned slaves. To a lesser extent, some intermarried with Native Americans.

Early colonial America was home to a number of different ethnic groups, but not all of these early multiracial families were ancestral to the later Melungeons. Over the generations, most individuals of the group called Melungeon were of European and African ancestries.



Paul Heinegg has traced free people of color families on the frontier in the censuses of 1790–1810 and found that most were descended from African Americans free in Virginia in colonial times, the families of working-class white women (who were indentured servants or free) and African men, free, indentured servants or slaves. A minority were descended from slaves who had been manumitted.

Free people of color, sometimes mixed-race families, are documented as migrating with European-American neighbors in the first half of the 18th century to the frontier of Virginia and to North and South Carolina. The Collins, Gibson, and Ridley (Riddle) families owned land adjacent to one another in Orange County, North Carolina, where they and the Bunch family were listed as "free Molatas (mulattos)", taxable on tithes in 1755. By settling in frontier areas, free people of color found more amenable living conditions and could escape some of the racial strictures of plantation areas.

Beginning about 1767, some of the ancestors of the Melungeons moved from the Tidewater area northwest to the frontier New River area of Virginia, where they are listed on tax lists of Montgomery County, Virginia, in the 1780s. From there they migrated south in the Appalachian Range to Wilkes County, North Carolina, where some are listed as "white" on the 1790 census. They resided in a part of that county which became Ashe County, where they are designated as "other free" in 1800.

Not long after, Collins and Gibson families (identified as Melungeon ancestors) were members of the Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church in nearby Scott County, Virginia, where they appear to have been treated as social equals of the white members. The earliest documented use of the term "Melungeon" is found in the minutes of this church. While there are historical references to the documents, the originals have not been found, and evidence came from a transcribed copy.

From Virginia and North Carolina, the families crossed into Kentucky and Tennessee. The earliest known Melungeon in Northeast Tennessee was Millington Collins, who executed a deed in Hawkins County in 1802. Several Collins and Gibson households appeared in Floyd County, Kentucky, in 1820, when they are listed as "free persons of color". On the 1830 censuses of Hawkins and Grainger County, Tennessee, Collins and Gibson families are listed as "free-colored". Melungeons were residents of the part of Hawkins that became Hancock County in 1844.

Contemporary accounts documented that Melungeon ancestors were considered to be mixed race by appearance. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, census enumerators designated them as "mulatto," "other free," or as "free persons of color." Sometimes they were listed as "white," sometimes as "black" or "negro", but almost never as "Indian." One family described as "Indian" was the Melungeon-related Ridley family, listed as such on a 1767 Pittsylvania County, Virginia, tax list, though they had been designated "mulattos" in 1755. During the 19th century, due to their intermarriage with white families and descendants of increasingly white appearance, Melungeon-surnamed families began to be classified as white on census records with increasing frequency, a trend that has continued to the present. In 1935, a state of Nevada newspaper anecdotally described Melungeons as "mulattoes" with "straight hair".

Jack Goins, an independent researcher, has acted as coordinator of the Melungeon DNA Project, an independent project started in 2005. Its goal is to study the ancestry of lines for which there is academic and genealogical consensus as belonging to historical Melungeon families. According to Jack Goins, the Melungeons who have the following surnames are in the Core Melungeon Group 1: Bunch, Collins, Goins, Gibson, Minor, Williams, Breedlove, Mullins, Denham, Bowlin(g), Moore, Shumake, Bolton, Perkins, Morning, Menley, Hopkins, and Mallet.

The Y-chromosomal DNA testing of male subjects with the Melungeon surnames Collins, Gibson, Goins, Bunch, Bowlin(g), Denham, Mullins, Hopkins, Perkins, Williams, Minor and Moore, has so far revealed evidence of a majority of European and sub-Saharan African ancestry: Y haplogroups R1b, R1a, I1, and E1b1a, respectively.



The numbers between the different Y-DNAs were: R1a(1(a)) = 3, R1b1 = 7, R1b1a2 = 50, R1b1a2a1a1b = 5, R1b1a2a1a1a = 3, R1b1a2a1a1b4 = 3, R1b1a2a1a1b3c = 1, R1b1a2a1a1b3 = 1, R1b1a2a1a1a4 = 1, R1b1a2a1a1b4b = 1,E = 2, E1a = 1, E1b1a = 9, E1b1a8a = 2, E1b1a7a = 3, E1b1b1 = 2, E1b1b1a1 = 2, E1b1b1a1b = 1, I1 = 14, I = 14, I2a = 4, I2b1 = 1, A = 2, G = 5, Q1a3a1 = 2, N1c1 = 1, J2 = 2, L = 1. Here are some examples of what and where each gene could possibly be from: Y-DNA E and its variants,[45] Y-DNA R1b and its variants, Y-DNA I1, Y-DNA I2b,[46] Y-DNA A, Y-DNA G, Y-DNA L, Y-DNA R1a(1) and Y-DNA J2 (these numbers are based off this website: http://www.familytreedna.com/public/...ction=yresults).

Haplogroup R1a has its strongest distributions in Eastern/Central Europe and in certain groups of South Asia. Haplogroup E is found in Cameroon/Gabon. Haplogroup Q1a3a1 is in the Native Americans and almost no where else. Haplogroup I2a is found highest among the Sardinians, South Slavic, and Romanians. Haplogroup R1b is strongest in Europe (the different variations have different areas of higher frequencies). Haplogroup E1a is found highest in Fulbe (Cameroon) 53% and Dogon (Mali) 45% (see Haplogroup E1a in Wikipedia). Haplogroup N1c1 has its highest frequencies in Finns and the Baltic Region of Europe.

Haplogroup E1b1a has its strongest distribution in West Africa. Haplogroup I2b1 has its strongest distribution in the Balkans of Southeast Europe. Haplogroup J2 has its strongest distribution in the Fertile Crescent. Haplogroup G has its strongest distribution in the Northern Fertile Crescent and Caucasus Region and is high among significant among the Kalash and Brahui of South Asia and some Jewish Groups. Haplogroup A is strongest in speakers of Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan Language Families of Africa. Haplogroup E1b1b1 is widely distributed in North and East Africa and West Asia. Haplogroup L has its strongest distribution in parts of South Asia and in the village of Afshar of Turkey. Haplogroup I1 has its strongest distribution in Northern Europe.

Taken as a whole, such findings appear to verify the 19th-century designation of Melungeon ancestors as "mulattos", that is, descendants of white Europeans and Africans, as well as the late twentieth-century genealogical work by Paul Heinegg, which came to the same conclusion. The line with a variety of haplogroups with roots in Portugal, Spain and Italy is consistent with historian Ira Berlin's research showing that some of the charter generation of enslaved or servant people in the Chesapeake Bay colony were Atlantic creoles. They were descended from African women and Spanish or Portuguese men; the latter worked in the slave trade at ports in Africa run by Spain and Portugal, and took wives from the indigenous population.

Last edited by Steven L. Akins; May 25th, 2012 at 10:40 AM.