NEW MELUNGEON NOTES
(John Clinard, March 2015)
INTRODUCTION
The notion that the E1b1a Austin Clan (not the Austin-Riggs family of my wife) produced some
Melungeon descendants or that the Clan was in some way aligned with, or married
into the recognized Melungeon families such as Collins, Goins, Gibson, Riddle
etc. was fostered by the researcher Charles E Austin. My first encounter with
Charles was more than 10 years ago. He contacted me by telephone. By the time
of 2004 I had a very extensive database posted on RootsWEB which included all
the studies I had posted about my wife’s Austin family (or, at least what I
thought at the time was my wife’s family). Charles saw it and discovered (I
don’t know how.) that I lived in Knoxville not too far from his home in
Ooltewah, near Chattanooga. In our conversations he tried to convince me that I
should have the Y-DNA of my wife’s father, brother or cousins checked. He was
thrilled by his own recent Y-DNA results that showed him to be of the E1b1a
haplogroup. He talked on about Portuguese sailors and Melungeons of Hancock Co.
TN. To tell you the truth, I though this
man must be a “kook”. So I catalogued
Charles’ ideas but did nothing about DNA, a subject that was mostly unknown to
me. The science of genetic genealogy was very new to almost everyone. But this
was not the end of my interest in Charles and his ideas.
Later after
several more years of research I reached the point where it became apparent
that I could prove through DNA that my wife’s 3rd great-grandfather,
Archibald Austin (b. 1767), bastard son of Wealthy Pruett, was truly a son of
Joseph Austin (b. 1730), son of John Sr. I had become very familiar with the
AFAOA database which contained a wealth of information on Southern Austins collected
by Janet Austin Curtis (d. 1991) and others, including more recently the work
of Charles E Austin (I was surprised about Charles.). To make a long story
short, the Y-DNA of my wife’s cousins proved that Archibald was not a son of
Joseph Austin, but rather of Edward Riggs. This caused my wife’s cousin and me
a bit of concern, but it drove me to deeper research resulting in an
historic-fictional short story about Wealthy Pruett which is crammed full of as
much genealogical data as was available.
This is long; so unless you wish to
wait a minute to download, read it at a later date.
Well,
Charles was starting to fade rapidly with his alzheimer's disease. But much of his work is recorded in the AFAOA
as well as elsewhere on the WEB. Supposedly the bulk of his data was donated to
the Saponi
Town group which is on the WEB at: http://www.saponitown.com/.
Other sites include
And Charles’
interactions with other researchers can be found on a variety of message boards
such as
Charles was
very busy “preaching” the Melungeon line of his families… particularly Austin
and Blevins.
In my story
of Wealthy Pruett, I included an appendix that discusses the Melungeon
possibilities. Though it is now a bit dated, I’ll still share it with you on my
dropbox.
You will
find a closing that was supplied by a famous man who sought to find his roots…
"In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our
heritage, to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this
enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments
in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting
loneliness. "
—Alex Haley
TODAY
In the AFAOA
database we can find:
INDIAN ANCESTRY:"
John, Jr identified himself as a Saponi at a court hearing in Surry County.
Valentine was also identified as an Indian at a court hearing in Surry County.
Later, it was discovered the Richard (son) and Joseph were identified by the
state of Virginia as Melungeons (Not of pure European blood). Since four of
the five known children have been identified as "mixed blood" it is
felt that there was only one mother for all the known children." Charles
Edwin Austin
Today after more research I must say
that I’m even less sure of what a Melungeon really was/is. The word “Melungeon” did not exist until ~1810, later than
this AFAOA reference. A word that did exist at the time of these court records was
Mulatto. That may well have been used… but not Melungeon.
But I have
uncovered interactions and marriages between the E1b1a Austin Clan and what is
generally agreed upon as the core Melungeon families, in particular the related
families that became isolated to the area of Newman Ridge in today’s Hancock
Co. TN. It has been an up-and-down battle to extract the “truth” from among a general
pile of data some of which is no doubt garbage data. But I have also read a
number of good books that ring of truth on the subject.
To start,
I’ll share just a couple of family trees that illustrate how the E1b1a Austin
lines cross into the Melungeon family space. The 1st tree can be
found on my RootsWEB database at:
Here we see the
connections to the Riddle family and the Riddle family’s connection to the
Collins family.
I have also illustrated the possibility that both the Riddle
and Collins families arrived in VA as indentured servants to well-known men such
as Abraham Wood and George Eaton. Abraham Wood (b. 1614) is famous as an
explorer on the early VA frontier and was one of the first to reach the area of
the Upper New River. His son Thomas held the indenture of Henry Collins (b.
~1670), grandfather of Vardy Collins. If you Google “Vardy Collins” you can
spend the rest of the day reading about Melungeon families. It has been
reported that John Austin (Jr.) traveled with Vardy
Collins's father to Grayson County, VA. The year was 1757. Vardy was not born until
1764; but John Jr. had small children including son Stephen who was 2 years old
in 1757.
Moses Riddle (b. ~1724) is acknowledged to be NA by none
other than Maud Carter Clement in her book The History of Pittsylvania Co. VA. What is impressive is that Moses is the “only” NA citizen
of Pittsylvania in 1767 mentioned in her book. She notes a few Mulattoes and a
very large number of Negroes, since that was the way the tithe lists noted
these men (and sometimes women). Maude bid farewell to the NA/Saponi with a
nice gesture: “Thus passed from VA this noble tribe of red
men, leaving to us who have succeeded to their domain but a faint outline of
their tragic story.” Do you suppose she had no inkling of the many
interracial marriages involving those soles of Pittsylvania Co. VA who occur on
the tithe lists?
The 2nd
tree can be found on my RootsWEB database at:
Above is
part of the Austin-Goins tree. The ancestral link is to William Austin and wife
Rebecca Moses. William is in the AFAOA at: http://www.afaoa.org/db_files/Thomas_Austin_VA/Individuals/I1313.html
I have written
up this connection and the file is also in my dropbox:
I
particularly like this line because it connects many of my personal family
lines such as Cherokee families Fields, Emory and Grant. Sula Bonnie Austin’s
family migrated from TN to AR to OK. These look like voluntary migrations; yet
they ended up in the area of the Cherokee Reservation in OK, probably to
reunite with other Cherokee family members.
GOING… GOING… GONE
Assimilation is the natural means by which the Red and Black
members of the Melungeon people started to disappear. Ad-mixing with whites over multiple
generations has eliminated most traces of autosomal-DNA that might prove
particular connections of the Melungeons to Red and Black ancestors. Few, if any, Melungeons males carry the Y-DNA
of Native American men; and few Melungeon women carry the mt-DNA of Native American women. Those lines
can only have disappeared due to lack of continuous propagation… that is, the
lines died out.
But NAs have disappeared by other means. Let’s not forget Walter Ashby Plecker (1861-1947) and the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Plecker
in particular resented Negroes who passed as Indians, and came to
firmly believe that the state's Native American had been
"mongrelized" with its African American population. In
fact, since shortly after the Civil War, Native Americans from all over the
country had been brought to the Hampton area to be educated with blacks,
and some had married, although that Indian school had closed as racial
discrimination against Indians and this eugenics movement grew. Plecker refused
to recognize that many mixed-race Virginian Indians had maintained their
culture and identity as Indians over the centuries despite economic
assimilation. Plecker ordered state agencies to reclassify most citizens
who claimed American Indian identity as "colored," although many
Virginia Indians had continued in their tribal practices and communities.
Church records, for instance, continued to identify them as Indians.
Specifically, Plecker ordered state agencies to reclassify certain families
whom he identified by surname, as he had decided they were trying to pass and
evade segregation. This remained legal in the South until federal
legislation in the 1960s.
In addition, Plecker lobbied the US
Census Bureau to drop the category of "mulatto" in the 1930 and later
censuses. This deprived mixed-race people of recognition of their
identity and contributed to a binary culture of hypodescent, in which
mixed-race persons were often classified as the group with lower social status.
Not until the 21st century did the census allow individuals to indicate more than one race or ethnic group in
self-identification.
Then there is the
work of the genealogist Paul Heinegg.
His award winning research is included in Virginia, North Carolina and
South Carolina (Mixed Blood Families). It can be found on the WEB at
http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/ or you can find
a PDF copy in my dropbox at
Paul documented the Negro bloodline
of many of the families that eventually ended up being called Melungeon. Some
say he changed Red to Black. His work encompassed much more, however. For his
research he has earned the scorn of several participants in the Melungeon
DNA Project. This project is described on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melungeon_DNA_Project
It will give you a bad feeling about
the “war” going on between different factions over the subject of Melungeon
heritage. It is a war that I intend to
completely avoid. I have already been “burned” once for trying to offer
suggestions to the Saponi Descendants Association & Free Native American Indians
led by Scott Preston Collins. It’s a long story.
Let me suggest one additional Blog
Site that seems balanced: http://youhavetobethistalltogoonthisride.blogspot.com/2012/06/melungeon-ydna-study-findings-vardy.html
And another WEB-based article/Blog by Joanne
Pezzullo, a woman who chairs several of the Native American and Melungeon DNA
studies that can be found under Family Tree DNA.
Natural elimination through law - The ways the laws of racial discrimination have been written
and enforced throughout the history of the British American Colonies and
throughout the history of the USA have certainly contributed to the “diminishment”
of races other than Caucasian. We have been, and continue to be a racially
biased Nation. In order to survive or simply just to get ahead many Red and
Black people have been driven to become White.
I wish this were not true, but it is. I have to admit it’s getting
better… it’s getting better all the time… as the Beatles have written.
Wikipedia has a very good synopsis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melungeon looking at laws of the past. An early law/decree was from the
state of TN and may well have been a good reason for mixed-breeds to become TN
citizens because being a free person (of color) gave one the rights of any
other free person, even an Anglo-Saxon Caucasian.
“Persons that
are known and recognized by the Constitution and laws of Tennessee, as free persons of
color are those who
by the act of 1794 section 32 are taken and deemed to be capable in law to be
certified in any case what is in, except against each other or in the language
of the statute "all Negroes, Indians, Mulattoes, and all persons of mixed
blood descended from Negro or Indian ancestors to the third generation
inclusive though one ancestor of each generation may have been a white person,
white bond or free." ... That if the great grandfather of Plaintiff was an
Indian or Negro and he is descended on the mother's side from a white woman,
without any further Negro or Indian blood than such as he derived on the
father's side, then the Plaintiff is not of mix blood, or within the third
generation inclusive; in other words that if the Plaintiff has not in his veins
more than 1/8 of Negro or Indian blood, he
is a citizen of this state and it would be slanderous to call him a Negro.”
There is another meaningful statement
about law and race.
“Law was
involved not only in recognizing race, but in creating it; the state itself
helped make people white. In allowing men of low social status to perform
whiteness by voting, serving on juries, and mustering in the militia, the state
welcomed every white man into symbolic equality with the Southern planter.
Thus, law helped to constitute white men as citizens, and citizens as white
men.”
END
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