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From: <>
Subject: [RHEA-L] Melungeons in the SE States- PART ONE
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 1998 23:55:22 EDT


My apologies to the group- I sent a message that Pat advised me needs to be
split into parts in order to be viewed by many of you.

I am resemding it in 3 parts.

Don Rhea

PART 1

To the Rhea Newsgroup--- My apologies for the long post that follows but since
so many Rheas come from the Southeast part of the country, I think we really
should have some knowledge of the Melungeons and I don't think I have ever
seen them ;;mentiolned in the Rhea-L group.

The following might be particularly interesting to the John Rhea Sr and Febra
Northcross descendants on the list since this family does have an 'Indian
Maiden" story ( Febra) in our lore. ( the possibility , as you will see, is
that Febra may have been Melungeon and not Cherokee or whatever other Indian
that may have been in the eastern Tn. area. )

This is not my research but my thanks go to Nancy Sparks Morrison who has
given permission to use it. For ease of locating the 'Indian' story in the
document, I have added underlines to this area.

Don Rhea

Mesa,, AZ

I am not sure if we have corresponded. I am sending you some info on the
MLGNs that I have recently revised. Sorry if I have sent this before. I can no
longer keep track of the number of people wth whom I have talked. :-)
Nancy S.

Nancy Sparks Morrison
Genealogist
Roanoke, Virginia 24015
USA
Email:

27KB

August 07, 1998

The opinions in this post are strictly my own, but have been based upon my
reading and
research of various materials noted herein. You may SHARE my work with
anyone, but it
is not to be sold or used for profit in any way, without my permission.

Are you familiar with the term Melungeon? If you answer, “Who or what are
Melungeons,” you are like most people. If you have been researching your
family in the
Cumberland Plateau of Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, West Virginia, and
Tennessee,
during the early migration years, you may be able to find them through a
connection to
this group of people who are only now being researched with unbiased eyes.
The
Melungeons are a people of apparent Mediterranean descent who may have
settled in the
Appalachian wilderness as early or possibly earlier than 1567. (The
Melungeons: The
Resurrection of a Proud People; N. Brent Kennedy, Mercer University Press,
Macon, GA,
USA, 1997; introduction, p. xiii) The Mediterrean includes areas of North
Africa,
southern Europe and Central Asia.

According to Dr. Kennedy, the Melungeons were “a people who almost certainly
intermarried with Powhatans, Pamunkeys, Creeks, Catawbas, Yuchis, and
Cherokees to
form what some have called, perhaps a bit FANCIFULLY, ‘a new race’.” Dr.
Kennedy
does not believe that we can call the Melungeons a ‘race.’. No dictionary
definition of
race fits with what we know of the Melungeons and recently, The American
Anthropological Association, declared that ‘race,’ was an inaccurate,
artificial way of
defining a people and was no longer of any value.

Certain surnames are associated with this highly interesting group of people.
I am
including a copy of those names.
Be aware, however, that many people bearing these surnames, even if they come
from the
Appalachian area, are NOT connected to the Melungeons. The surnames are to be
used as
an INDICATOR of POSSIBLE Melungeon ancestry. Also, note that many Melungeon
women ‘out-married,’ carrying the heritage with them, but not the names. Not
having one
of these names DOES NOT mean that the family was not of Melungeon descent.

Finding out about the Melungeons and my possible connection to them is the
MOST
fascinating thing I have EVER run into in my 20 years of genealogical
research. The
‘so-called,’ Melungeons were ‘discovered’ in the Appalachian Mountains in
1654 by
English explorers and were described as being ‘dark-skinned, reddish-brown
complexioned people supposed to be of Moorish descent, who were neither
Indian nor
Negro, but had fine European features, and claimed to be Portuguese.” (Louise
Davis,
“The Mystery of the Melungeons.” Nashville Tennessean, 22 September, 1963,
16.)

In April of 1673, James Needham, an Englishman and Gabriel Arthur, possibly
an
indentured servant came with approximately eight Indians, as explorers to the
Tennessee
Valley. There, Needham described finding “hairy people .... (who) have a bell
which is six
foot over which they ring morning and evening and at that time a great number
of people
congregrate togather and talkes” in a language not English nor any Indian
dialect that the
accompanying Indians knew. And yet these people seemingly looked European.
Needham
described them as “hairy, white people which have long beards and whiskers
and weares
clothing.” This bell seems to me to speak of a Latin influence among these
people. Other,
later explorers, found people who lived in log cabins with peculiar arched
windows. Dr.
Kennedy says that by the late 1700’s they were practicing the Christian
religion.

These people claimed that they were descended from a group of Portugese who
had been
shipwrecked or abandoned on the Atlantic coast. (Byron Stinson, “The
Melungeons,”
American History Illustrated, November, 1973:41) The term they used was
‘Portyghee.’
In other documents, some of these peoples were also described as having red
hair and
others with VERY distinctive blue or blue/green eyes. This description leads
me to believe
that these people were not Native American Indians. Altogether they must have
been a
striking looking people.

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