Applachia’s Melungeon

“There were a whole lot of people upset by this study,” lead researcher Roberta Estes said. “They just knew they were Portuguese, or Native American.”

In recent decades, interest in the origin of the Melungeons has risen dramatically with advances both in DNA research and in the advent of Internet resources that allow individuals to trace their ancestry without digging through dusty archives.

http://melungeon.ning.com/

Trailer from the documentary “Melungeon Voices” featuring “Sweet Rain” by Euphoria written by (EMI MP writer) Ken Ramm.

Melungeon Voices

Writer, Director, Producer – Julie Williams Dixon

Co-Director/DP – Warren Gentry

with : Dr. Brent Kennedy and other leading Melungeon researchers

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47565074/ns/health-health_care/t/dna-study-seeks-origin-appalachias-melungeons/#.UB74__ZlTm4

In Melungeons: Footprints from the Past, Author Jack H Goins revisits several events described in his previous book, Melungeons and other Pioneer Families, using new evidence from court records and DNA. Goins trails the Melungeons from Pamunkey River to the Flat River, then to the New River, Fort Blackmore, Blackwater adn Newman’s Ridge. Goins was born in Hancock County, Tennessee, and is a descendant of several pioneer families who settled in the Clinch River Valley circa 1800.

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 taken 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.”

In recent years, it has become a catchall term for people of mixed-race ancestry and has been applied to about 200 communities in the eastern U.S. – from New York to Louisiana.

Among them were the Montauks, the Mantinecocks, Van Guilders, the Clappers, the Shinnecocks and others in New York. Pennsylvania had the Pools; 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.

Allegedly Abraham Lincoln, Ava Gardner, Elvis Presley descends from the Melungeon Ancestry and Turkish from his mother’s side.