TENNESSEE MELUNGEONS AND RELATED GROUPS
Virginia Easley DeMarce
Historian
Branch of Acknowledgment and Research
Bureau of Indian Affairs
1849 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20240
What is a social isolate?
The great majority of individuals in the United States
who carry a mixed European, African, and Native American genealogical
heritage are not members of social isolate groups. The majority
of them identify with some other component of the wider society--most
commonly white, sometimes Black, and sometimes Native American.
As such persons trace their family history, they may find that
some, though probably not all, of their ancestors were at some
time part of a tri-racial isolate settlement. Therefore, the genealogical
study of such groups is of interest to a wide segment of the modern
American population.
The most basic and useful definition of mixed-race
social isolates for the purposes of academic study was compiled
in 1950 by a professional geographer. Edward T. Price wrote:
(1) The people must be racial mixtures of white and
non-white groups, Indian and/or negro peoples presumably providing
the latter blood in the absence of evidence to the contrary;
(2) they must have a social status differing from
that accorded whites, Indians, or negroes in the area in such
away as to throw them generally together in their more personal
social relationships;
(3) they must exist in such numbers and concentration
as to be recognized in their locality as such a group and usually
to be identified by a distinguishing group name (Price 1950, 5).
Price's emphasis on the existence of a group is fundamental
to studying the genealogy of social isolate groups as groups.
In spite of the ongoing myth that one drop of African ancestry
classified an individual or family as Black, the historical fact
is that this principal was nowhere a matter of law in the United
States prior to the early 20th century, whereas in most jurisdictions
prior to the Civil War, free persons with less than 1/8 or 1/16
African ancestry were, for legal purposes, classified as white.
While the prevalence of legal and social discrimination should
not be underestimated, neither should it be overestimated. In
many communities, whites were reluctant to apply law codes which
had been passed to control slaves and emancipated slaves to those
mixed-race families that had been free since early colonial times.
Often, if one mixed-race family moved into a county or comparable
jurisdiction, it was simply assimilated by the local majority
population, leaving scarcely a ripple in the historical record.
In order for a social isolate to develop, there had to be a large
enough group to permit enough endogamous marriages to sustain
a distinct population. For a general discussion of the complexities,
see the well-known article by Gary B. Mills and the recent more
general survey by Gary B. Nash.
What are the basic sources of information on social
isolates?
Writing about social isolates has falls primarily
into the categories of fact, folklore, fantasy, and even modern
fiction. It is not always easy to distinguish these categories
of writing. Spurred on by the wishful thinking of authors, fiction,
fantasy, and folklore have masqueraded as fact with some frequency.
Outright fiction is probably the least common: it can be very
interesting in its own right. However, at least in the case of
Appalachian writer Sharyn McCrumb's Elizabeth MacPherson mystery
novel, the "common sense" historical explanation which
the author adopted has no discernable basis in the genealogical
documentation of the families who are known to have lived in social
isolate settlements in the tri-state region of southwestern Virginia,
northwestern North Carolina, and northeastern Tennessee.
Fantasy. John Sevier's letter mentioning a tribe
of "white Indians" which supposedly lived in eastern
Tennessee in the late 18th century has provided the root of many
of the more improbable speculations on the origins of the isolate
settlements. One of the most widespread resulting fantasies has
been the attempt to link these settlements with early Portuguese
explorations of the North American continent. The improbability
of such connections is made clear by Charles M. Hudson's recent
impartial survey of these explorations. Turkish origins are equally
improbable.
Fact. The actual, factual, history of social isolate
settlements is going to be written by genealogists and family
historians: document by individual document, fact by painstaking
fact. The function and duty of the historian and the genealogist
is to demystify and to demythologize.
I want to particularly cite one family genealogist
who, by painstaking local research, has traced the written usage
of the word "Melungeon" at a date much earlier than
it had been located by professional historians and anthropologists,
who had made do with a recollection, written in the 1880's, that
the word had been used in the late 1840's: Jack Harold Goins of
Rogersville, Tennessee, located a written use of the word on September
26, 1813. Jack descends from Zephaniah Goins. Knowing that his
ancestors were Primitive Baptists, Jack Goins searched first the
minutes of the Blackwater Primitive Baptist Church, where Zephaniah
and Elizabeth (Thompson) Goins were members. These led him to
the minutes of the Stoney Creek Primitive Baptist Church at Ft.
Blackmore, Washington County, Virginia (about eight miles southwest
of present-day Dungannon, Virginia, in Scott County), just across
the state line from Tennessee.
By carefully tracing a specific family along a specific
migration route, this author has made a major contribution not
only to family genealogy, but to historical and anthropological
research. More research of equally high quality needs to be undertaken.
When we know the origins of each individual Melungeon family,
we will know the origins of the Melungeons. When we know the origins
of each family in other social isolates, we will begin to understand
their genesis and development.