Melungeon Explained

Group:	Melungeon
Regions:	United States (East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky)
Languages:	Southern American English
Religions:	Predominately Protestant Christianity, historically Traditional African religions with historical minorities of Judaism, Islam, Indian religions.
Related Groups:	Lumbee, Atlantic Creole, Turks of South Carolina, Chestnut Ridge people, White Southerners, Black Southerners, Native Americans, Dominickers, Redbone (ethnicity), Mulatto, Coloureds, Griqua people, Basters, Métis, Black Indians in the United States, Garifuna

Melungeon (sometimes also spelled Malungean, Melangean, Melungean, Melungin^[1]) was a slur^[2] historically applied to individuals and families of mixed-race ancestry with roots in colonial Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina primarily descended from free people of color and white settlers.^{[3] [4] [5] [6]} In modern times, the term has been reclaimed by descendants of these families, especially in southern Appalachia.^{[7] [8] [9]} Despite this mixed heritage, many modern Melungeons pass as white, as did many of their ancestors.^{[10] [11] [12] [13] [14]} Most of the modern population have an estimated 1-2% non-European DNA, though jumping up to 20% or more in some groups, such as the Lumbee.^{[15] [16] [17]}

Many groups have historical, been referred to as Melungeon, including: the Melungeons of Newman's Ridge,^[18] the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina,^{[19] [20]} the Chestnut Ridge people,^[21] and the Carmel Indians.^[22]

Free people of color in colonial Virginia were predominately of African and European descent, however many families also had varying amounts of Native American and East Indian ancestry.^{[23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]}

Some modern researchers believe that early Atlantic Creole slaves, descended from or acculturated by Iberian lançados^[29] and Sephardi Jews fleeing the Inquisition,^{[30] [31] [32] [33] [34]} were one of the pre-cursor populations to these groups.^{[35] [36] [37]} Many creoles, once in British America, were able to obtain their freedom and many married into local white families.^{[38] [39] [40] [41] [42]}

In the general U.S. census, Melungeon people were enumerated as of the races to which they most resembled.^[43]

Etymology

The term Melungeon likely comes from the French word mélange ultimately derived from the Latin verb miscēre ("to mix, mingle, intermingle").^[44] It was once a derogatory term, but is used by the Melungeon people today as a primary identifier. The Tennessee Encyclopedia states that in the 19th century, "the word 'Melungeon' appears to have been used as an offensive term for nonwhite and/or low socioeconomic class persons by outsiders."

The term Melungeon was historically considered an insult, a label applied to Appalachians who were by appearance or reputation of mixed-race ancestry. Although initially pejorative in character,^[45] this word has been reclaimed by members of the community.^[46] The spelling of the term varied widely, as was common for words and names at the time.

According to the 1894 Department of Interior Report of Indians Taxed and not Taxed within the "Tennessee" report, "The civilized (self-supporting) Indians of Tennessee, counted in the general census numbered 146 (71 males and 75 females) and are distributed as follows: Hawkins county, 31; Monroe county, 12; Polk county, 10; other counties (8 or less in each), 93. Quoting from the report:

The Melungeans or Malungeans, in Hawkins county, claim to be Cherokees of mixed blood (white, Indian, and negro), their white blood being derived, as they assert, from English and Portuguese stock. They trace their descent primarily to 2 Indians (Cherokees) known, one of them as Collins, the other as Gibson, who settled in the mountains of Tennessee, where their descendants are now to be found, about the time of the admission of that state into the Union (1796).

Early uses

The earliest historical record of the term Melungeon dates to 1813. In the minutes of the Stoney Creek Baptist Church in Scott County, Virginia, a woman stated another parishioner made the accusation that "she harbored them Melungins."^[47] The second oldest written use of the term was in 1840, when a Tennessee politician described "an impudent Melungeon" from what became Washington, D.C., as being "a scoundrel who is half Negro and half Indian." In the 1890s, during the age of yellow journalism, the term "Melungeon" started to circulate and be reproduced in U.S. newspapers, when the journalist Will Allen Dromgoole wrote several articles on the Melungeons.^[48]

In 1894, the US Department of the Interior, in its "Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed," under the section "Tennessee" noted:

In a number of states small groups of people, preferring the freedom of the woods or the seashore to the confinement of regular labor in civilization, have become in some degree distinct from their neighbors, perpetuating their qualities and absorbing into their number those of like disposition, without preserving very clear racial lines. Such are the remnants called Indians in some states where a pure-blooded Indian can hardly longer be found. In Tennessee is such a group, popularly known as Melungeans, in addition to those still known as Cherokees. The name seems to have been given them by early French settlers, who recognized their mixed origin and applied to them the name Melangeans or Melungeans, a corruption of the French word "melange" which means mixed. (See letter of Hamilton McMillan, under North Carolina.)^{[44] [43]}

History

In December 1943, Walter Ashby Plecker of Virginia sent county officials a letter warning against "colored" families trying to pass as "white" or "Indian" in violation of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. He identified these as being "chiefly Tennessee Melungeons". He directed the offices to reclassify members of certain families as black, causing the loss for numerous families of documentation in records that showed their continued self-identification as being of Native American descent on official forms.^{[49] [50]}

In the 20th century, during the Jim Crow era, some Melungeons attended boarding schools in Asheville, North Carolina, Warren Wilson College, and Dorland Institution which integrated earlier than other schools in the southern United States.^[51]

"King of the Melungeons"

During the American Revolution, there was purportedly a Melungeon "king" or "chief" named Micajah Bunch (1723–1804). Local folklore claims he intermarried with the Cherokee, making the Melungeons a branch of the tribe, though no documentation of this event exists.The last male in Micajah's bloodline, Michael Joseph Bullard, died in a swimming accident at the age of 15 in 1991.^[52]

Civil War

Many free people of color, white-passing or otherwise, served in the American Civil War on both sides of the conflict. Some served in the Confederate military,^{[53] [54]} though others resisted the Confederate government, such as Henry Berry Lowry.^[55]

Culture

There is no uniquely Melungeon culture, though specific groups have formed into their own tribal entities on the basis of ancestral connections to historical Native American communities.^{[56] [57]}

Due to the lasting impact of colonialism, the decimation of initial contact tribes, and the legacy of American chattel slavery, culturally these mixed-race groups resemble their white settler neighbors in culture, with few exceptions.^[58]

Melungeon families

Definitions of who is Melungeon differ. Historians and genealogists have tried to identify surnames of different Melungeon families.^[59] In 1943, Virginia State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, identified surnames by county: "Lee, Smyth and Wise: Collins, Gibson, (Gipson), Moore, Goins, Ramsey, Delph, Bunch, Freeman, Mise, Barlow, Bolden (Bolin), Mullins, Hawkins (chiefly Tennessee Melungeons)".

In 1992, Virginia DeMarce explored and reported the Goins genealogy as a Melungeon surname.^[60] Beginning in the early 19th century, or possibly before, the term Melungeon was applied as a slur to a group of about 40 families along the Tennessee-Virginia border, but it has since become a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of mysterious mixed-race ancestry. Through time the term has changed meanings but often referred to any mixed-race person and, at different times, has referred to 200 different communities across the Eastern United States. These have included Van Guilders and Clappers of New York and Lumbees in North Carolina to Creoles in Louisiana.

Claims

Anthropologist E. Raymond Evans wrote in 1979 regarding Melungeons: "In Graysville, the Melungeons strongly deny their Black heritage and explain their genetic differences by claiming to have had Cherokee grandmothers. Many of the local whites also claim Cherokee ancestry and appear to accept the Melungeon claim. ..."^[61]

In 1999, historian C. S. Everett hypothesized that John Collins (recorded as a Sapony Indian who was expelled from Orange County, Virginia about January 1743), might be the same man as the Melungeon ancestor John Collins, who was classified as a "mulatto" in 1755 North Carolina records.^[62] However, Everett revised that theory after he discovered evidence that these were two different men named John Collins. Only descendants of the latter man, who was identified as mulatto in the 1755 record in North Carolina, have any proven connection to the Melungeon families of eastern Tennessee.^[63]

Jack D. Forbes speculated that the Melungeons may have been Saponi/Powhatan descendants, although he acknowledges an account from circa 1890 described them as being "free colored" and mulatto people.^[64]

Myths

Dispute regarding the origin of Melungeons families has led to a large amount of ahistorical and dubious myths regarding their origins. Some myths involve physical characteristics and genetic diseases that are claimed to indicate Melungeon descent, such as shovel-shaped incisors, an Anatolian bump, Familial Mediterranean fever, polydactyly, dark skin with bright colored eyes, and high cheekbones.^[65]

Other myths claim that the Melungeons are descendants of lost Spanish colonists, marooned Portuguese sailors,^[66] descendants of the ancient Israelites or Phoenicians,^[67] Romani slaves, or Turkish settlers.^[68]

Genetic testing

From 2005 to 2011, researchers Roberta J. Estes, Jack H. Goins, Penny Ferguson, and Janet Lewis Crain began the Melungeon Core Y-DNA Group online. They interpreted these results in their (2011) paper titled "Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population",^[69] which shows that ancestry of the sample is primarily European and African, with one person having a Native American paternal haplotype.Estes, Goins, Ferguson, and Crain wrote in their 2011 summary "Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population" that the Riddle family is the only Melungeon participant with historical records identifying them as having Native American origins, but their DNA is European. Among the participants, only the Sizemore family is documented as having Native American DNA. "Estes and her fellow researchers "theorize that the various Melungeon lines may have sprung from the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s, before slavery. They conclude that as laws were put in place to penalize the mixing of races, the various family groups could only intermarry with each other, even migrating together from Virginia through the Carolinas before settling primarily in the mountains of East Tennessee."^[70]

Racial laws and court cases

Melungeon ancestors were considered by appearance to be mixed race. During the 18th and the early 19th centuries, census enumerators classified them as "mulatto," "other free," or as "free persons of color." Sometimes they were listed as "white" or sometimes as "black" or "negro," or even "Indian." One family described as "Indian" was the Ridley (Riddle) family, as was noted on a 1767 Pittsylvania County, Virginia, tax list. Another tri-racial family described as “Indian” was the Butler family, as was noted in the 1860 census for Whitley County, Kentucky, with the family patriarch (named Simon Butler), being born in Tennessee around 1776.

Ariela Gross referenced the 1846 State v. Solomon, Ezekial, Levi, Andrew, Wiatt, Vardy Collins, Zachariah, Lewis Minor, Hawkins County Circuit Court Minute Book, 1842–1848, Hawkins County Circuit Court, Hawkins County Courthouse box 31, 32 and the Jacob F. Perkins vs. John R. White, Carter County, July 1855 Abstract of depositions to support her conclusions made about identity and citizenship in 19th-century United States.^[71] In 1924, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act that codified hypodescent or the "one-drop rule, suggesting that anyone with any trace of African ancestry was legally Black and would fall under Jim Crow laws designed to limit the freedoms and rights of Black people.^[72] Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States were not declared unconstitutional until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case.^[73]

Modern identity

By the mid-to-late 19th century, the term Melungeon appeared to have been used most frequently to refer to the biracial families of Hancock County and neighboring areas. Several other uses of the term in the print media, from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, have been collected by the Melungeon Heritage Association.^[51]

Since the mid-1990s, popular interest in the Melungeons has grown tremendously, although many descendants have left the region of historical concentration. The writer Bill Bryson devoted the better part of a chapter to them in his The Lost Continent (1989). People are increasingly self-identifying as having Melungeon ancestry.^[74] Internet sites promote the anecdotal claim that Melungeons are more prone to certain diseases, such as sarcoidosis or familial Mediterranean fever. Academic medical centers have noted that neither of those diseases is confined to a single population.^[75]

Literature

Author Jesse Stuart's 1965 novel Daughter of the Legend, set in Tennessee, depicts a love story between a Melungeon girl and a timber cutter from Virginia, and explores socioeconomic and racial tensions among mountain-dwelling families.

A Melungeon character is the titular protagonist and narrator of Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, which was a co-recipient of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel takes place primarily in Lee County, Virginia and environs.

See also

• Chestnut Ridge people of West Virginia
• Croatan
• Dominickers in the Florida Panhandle
• List of topics related to the African diaspora
• Mulatto
• Pardo
• Ramapough Mountain Indians ("Jackson Whites")
• Redbone (ethnicity)
• Turks of South Carolina
• Vardy Community School

Further reading

• Ball, Bonnie (1992). The Melungeons: Notes on the Origin of a Race' '. Johnson City, Tennessee: Overmountain Press.
• Berry, Brewton (1963). Almost White: A Study of Certain Racial Hybrids in the Eastern United States. New York: Macmillan Press.
• Bible, Jean Patterson (1975). Melungeons Yesterday and Today. Signal Mountain, Tennessee: Mountain Press.
• Brake, Katherine Vande. How They Shine: How They Shine: Melungeon Characters in Fiction of Appalachia. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Brake, Katherine Vande. Through the Back Door: Melungeon Literacies and Twenty-First Century Technologies. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Cavender, Anthony P. "The Melungeons of Upper East Tennessee: Persisting Social Identity," Tennessee Anthropologist 6 (1981): 27–36
• Goins, Jack H. (2000). Melungeons: And Other Pioneer Families, Blountville, Tennessee: Continuity Press.
• Dromgoole, William "Will" Allen (1891). The Malungeon Tree and Its Four Branches, Melungeon Heritage Association.
• Hashaw, Tim. Children of Perdition: Melungeons and the Struggle of Mixed America. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Heinegg, Paul (2005). FREE AFRICAN AMERICANS OF VIRGINIA, NORTH CAROLINA, SOUTH CAROLINA, MARYLAND AND DELAWARE Including the family histories of more than 80% of those counted as "all other free persons" in the 1790 and 1800 census, Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing, 1999–2005. Available in its entirety online.
• Hirschman, Elizabeth. Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Johnson, Mattie Ruth (1997). My Melungeon Heritage: A Story of Life on Newman's Ridge. Johnson City, Tennessee: Overmountain Press.
• Kennedy, N. Brent (1997) The Melungeons: the resurrection of a proud people. Mercer University Press.
• Kessler, John S. and Donald Ball. North From the Mountains: A Folk History of the Carmel Melungeon Settlement, Highland County, Ohio. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Langdon, Barbara Tracy (1998). The Melungeons: An Annotated Bibliography: References in both Fiction and Nonfiction, Hemphill, Texas: Dogwood Press.
• News: Lister . Richard . Lost people of Appalachia . . July 3, 2009.
• McGowan, Kathleen (2003). "Where do we really come from?", DISCOVER 24 (5, May 2003)
• Offutt, Chris. (1999) "Melungeons", in Out of the Woods, Simon & Schuster.
• Overbay, DruAnna Williams. Windows on the Past: The Cultural Heritage of Vardy, Hancock County, Tennessee. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Podber, Jacob. The Electronic Front Porch: An Oral History of the Arrival of Modern Media in Rural Appalachia and the Melungeon Community. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Price, Henry R. (1966). "Melungeons: The Vanishing Colony of Newman's Ridge." Conference paper. American Studies Association of Kentucky and Tennessee. March 25–26, 1966.
• Reed, John Shelton (1997). "Mixing in the Mountains", Southern Cultures 3 (Winter 1997): 25–36.
• Scolnick, Joseph M Jr. and N. Brent Kennedy. (2004). From Anatolia to Appalachia: A Turkish American Dialogue. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Vande Brake, Katherine (2001). How They Shine: Melungeon Characters in the Fiction of Appalachia, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press.
• Williamson, Joel (1980). New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States, New York: Free Press.
• Winkler, Wayne. 2019. Beyond the sunset: The Melungeon drama, 1969-1976. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
• Winkler, Wayne (2004). "Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia", Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press.
• Winkler, Wayne and Estes, Roberta (7/11/2012). "For Some People of Appalachia complicated roots", Tell Me More. National Public Radio. npr.org accessed 12 June 2023

External links

• Melungeon Heritage Association
• Mixed Race Studies
• Paul Brodwin, ""Bioethics in action" and human population genetics researMacon, GA: Mercer University Press.ch", Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Volume 29, Number 2 (2005), 145–178, DOI: 10.1007/s11013-005-7423-2 PDF, addresses issue of 2002 Melungeon DNA study by Kevin Jones, which is unpublished
• Paul Heinegg, Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware, 1999–2005
• "Melungeons", Digital Library of Appalachia. Contains numerous photographs and documents related to Melungeons, mostly from 1900 to 1950.
• A Mystery People: The Melungeons From Louis Gates Jr's "Finding your Roots."

Notes and References

1. Web site: 1894 Report of the U.S. Department of the Interior, in its Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed . www2.census.gov . Department of the Interior . 12 June 2023.
2. Gibson . Toby D. . 2013 . The Melungeons of Newman’s Ridge: An Insider’s Perspective . Appalachian Heritage . 41 . 4 . 59–66 . 2692-9287.
3. Web site: Melungeons NCpedia . 2024-05-23 . www.ncpedia.org.
4. Schrift . Melissa . 2013-04-01 . Becoming Melungeon . University of Nebraska Press: Sample Books and Chapters.
5. Web site: Press . The Associated Press The Associated . 2012-05-24 . DNA finds origin of Appalachia’s Melungeons: African men, white women . 2024-05-23 . The Denver Post . en-US.
6. Web site: 2021-07-11 . Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History 2018059613, 2019013274, 9780252051234, 9780252042393, 9780252084188 . 2024-05-23 . ebin.pub . en.
7. Web site: Loller . Travis . 'A whole lot of people upset by this study': DNA & the truth about Appalachia’s Melungeons . 2024-08-14 . The News Leader . en-US.
8. Web site: Rust . Randal . Melungeons . 2024-08-14 . Tennessee Encyclopedia . en-US.
9. Web site: FAQ . 2024-08-14 . Melungeon Heritage Association . en-US.
10. Web site: Wolfe . Brendan . Racial Integrity Laws (1924–1930) . 2024-08-14 . Encyclopedia Virginia . en-US.
11. News: Philipkoski . Kristen . Melungeon Secret Solved, Sort Of . 2024-08-14 . Wired . en-US . 1059-1028.
12. Web site: Projects Passing: Flexibility in Race and Gender Experimental Study Group . 2024-08-14 . MIT OpenCourseWare . en.
13. Web site: Schroeder . Joan Vannorsdall . 2009-02-01 . First Union: The Melungeons Revisited . 2024-08-14 . Blue Ridge Country . en-us.
14. Billingsley . Carolyn Earle . 2004 . Winkler . Wayne . Melungeons: A Study in Racial Complexity—A Review Essay . The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society . 102 . 2 . 207–223 . 0023-0243.
15. Web site: 2023-09-30 . Learn About Hidden African DNA & Ancestry . 2024-08-14 . 23andMe Blog . en.
16. Web site: 2014-08-06 . Melungeon DNA Study - Genetic Evidence – Access Genealogy . 2024-08-14 . en-US.
17. Web site: 2016-05-18 . Discussion: Cumbos as Lumbee . 2024-08-14 . Cumbo Family Website . en-US.
18. Web site: Mystery of Newman's Ridge . 2024-08-14 . historical-melungeons.com.
19. Web site: Review . 2024-08-14 . historical-melungeons.com.
20. Web site: Anonymous . 2022-05-12 . Are They Kin to the ‘Lost Colony’? . 2024-08-14 . Digital Scholarship and Initiatives . en.
21. http://www.underonesky.org/Guineas.html Joanne Johnson Smith & Florence Kennedy Barnett, "The Guineas of West Virginia: A Transcript of A Presentation at First Union"
22. Web site: Gazette . Times . 2020-06-23 . Highland Co.’s lost tribe . 2024-08-14 . The Times Gazette . en-US.
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24. Web site: Heinegg . Paul . Freedom in the Archives: Free African Americans in Colonial America . 2024-08-14 . Commonplace . en-US.
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29. News: Foner . Eric . 8 June 2018 . Ira Berlin, 1941–2018 . The Nation.
30. O'Neill . Brian Juan . 2017 . Review of Creole Societies in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, Havik, Philip J., and Malyn Newitt, eds . Africa Today . 63 . 4 . 84–90 . 10.2979/africatoday.63.4.05 . 10.2979/africatoday.63.4.05 . free . 10071/14918.
31. Web site: African blacks and Mulattos in the 17th-Century Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community . 2024-05-27 . www.asser.nl . en.
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33. Book: Schorsch . Jonathan . A Letter's Importance: The Spelling of Daka(h) (Deut. 23:2) and the Broadening of Western Sephardic Rabbinic Culture . 2019 . 978-90-04-39248-9 . Revisiting Blackness, Slavery, and Jewishness in the Early Modern Sephardic Atlantic . 10.1163/9789004392489_022.
34. Mariana Pequena, a black Angolan jew in early eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro . Kananoja . Kalle . 2013 . 1814/27607.
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36. Berlin . Ira . 1996 . From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African- American Society in Mainland North America . The William and Mary Quarterly . 53 . 2 . 251–288 . 10.2307/2947401 . 2947401.
37. Bartl . Renate . American tri-racials: African-Native contact, multi-ethnic Native American Nations, and the ethnogenesis of tri-racial groups in North America . 2018 . Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München . 10.5282/edoc.26874.
38. Book: Berlin . Ira . Critical Readings on Global Slavery (4 vols.) . 2017 . 978-90-04-34661-1 . 1216–1262 . From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America . 10.1163/9789004346611_039.
39. Web site: The Anti-Amalgamation Law is Passed . 2024-05-27 . African American Registry . en.
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41. Web site: Introduction to Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina . 2024-05-27 . freeafricanamericans.com.
42. News: Dodge . David . January 1886 . The Free Negroes of North Carolina . The Atlantic.
43. Web site: 1894 Report of the U.S. Department of the Interior, in its Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed . 4 Sep 2023 . www2.census.gov . Department of the Interior.
44. Web site: 1894 Report of the U.S. Department of the Interior, in its Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed . www2.census.gov . Department of the Interior . 4 Sep 2023.
45. Sovine, Melanie L. "The Mysterious Melungeons: a Critique of the Mythical Image." University of Kentucky Ph.D. dissertation, 1982
46. "Frequently Asked Questions." Melungeon Heritage Association. Retrieved December 2023
47. Web site: Toplovich . Ann . Melungeons . Tennessee Encyclopedia . Tennessee Historical Society . 3 July 2023.
48. Web site: Pezzullo . Joanne . Calloway Collins . The Historical Melungeons . 10 August 2017 . 12 June 2023.
49. Book: Schrift . Melissa . Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South . 2013 . . 978-0-8032-7154-8 . Introduction.
50. Web site: The Racial Integrity Act, 1924: An Attack on Indigenous Identity . . 25 August 2023 . June 21, 2023.
51. News: Neal . Melungeons explore mysterious mixed-race origins . 7 July 2023 . USA Today . June 24, 2015.
52. Web site: King of The Melungeons . 2024-08-14 . www.historical-melungeons.com.
53. Web site: CCW . 2018-09-06 . Jacob Bryant: A Documented Lumbee Indian Who Fought in the Confederate Army . 2024-05-27 . NC History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction . en-US.
54. Web site: Rheinheimer . Kurt . 2009-01-01 . The Melungeons: A New Journey Home . 2024-05-27 . Blue Ridge Country . en-us.
55. 30 March 1872 . The North Carolina Bandits . Harper's Weekly.
56. Web site: Staff . Ben Steelman StarNews . "The Lumbee Indians" -- black, white and shades of red . 2024-08-19 . Wilmington Star-News . en-US.
57. Web site: Rosenzweig . Brian . 2023-03-05 . ‘I know who I am:’ A Black mother and son’s journey of learning to embrace their mixed-race American Indian identity . 2024-08-19 . UNC Media Hub . en-US.
58. Web site: FAQ . 2024-08-19 . Melungeon Heritage Association . en-US.
59. Web site: Plecker . Walter A. . Surnames, by Counties and Cities, of Mixed Negroid Virginia Families Striving to Pass as "Indian" or White . Encyclopedia Virginia: Virginia Humanities . Library of Virginia . 12 June 2023.
60. [Virginia DeMarce|DeMarce, Virginia Easley]
61. Evans, E. Raymond (1979). "The Graysville Melungeons: A Tri-racial People in Lower East Tennessee", Tennessee Anthropologist IV(1): 1–31.
62. C. S. Everett, "Melungeon History and Myth," Appalachian Journal (1999)
63. Web site: Free African Americans, op.cit., Church and Cotanch Families . Freeafricanamericans.com . August 21, 2013.
64. Book: Forbes . Jack D. . Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples . 1993 . University of Illinois Press . Champaign, IL . 9780252051005 .
65. Web site: PRESS . Travis Loller ASSOCIATED . DNA study pops myths of Appalachia's Melungeons . 2024-08-14 . The Worcester Telegram & Gazette . en-US.
66. Web site: 2021-09-10 . The Origins of the Melungeons . 2024-08-14 . Larimer County Genealogical Society . en-US.
67. Web site: Melungeons in Virginia . 2024-08-14 . www.virginiaplaces.org.
68. Web site: Sassounian . Harut . 2012-07-25 . Sassounian: DNA Study Busts Myth that One Million Appalachians Are of Turkish Descent . 2024-08-14 . The Armenian Weekly . en-US.
69. Estes . Roberta A. . Goins . Jack H. . Ferguson . Penny . Crain . Janet Lewis . Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population . Journal of Genetic Genealogy . Fall 2011 . 7 . 1 . 3 July 2023 . 71.006.
70. >News: DNA study seeks origin of Melungeons . 30 August 2023 . . . May 25, 2012.
71. Gross . Ariela . Ariela Gross . 2007 . "Of Portuguese Origin": Litigating Identity and Citizenship among the "Little Races" in Nineteenth-Century America . Law and History Review . 25 . 3 . 467–512 . 10.1017/S0738248000004259 . 27641498 . 144084310 . 0738-2480.
72. Smith, J. Douglas. “The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: ‘Nominally White, Biologically Mixed, and Legally Negro.’” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 68, no. 1, 2002, pp. 65–106. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3069691. Accessed 3 Sept. 2023.
73. Web site: Loving v. Virginia . History Channel . 4 July 2023 . 14 December 2022.
74. Book: Kennedy . N. Brent . Robyn Vaughan . Kennedy . The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People: An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America . Mercer University Press . Macon, GA . 1997 . 2nd . 0-86554-516-2 . Google Books.
75. Web site: "Learning About Familial Mediterranean Fever", National Human Genome Research Institute . Genome.gov . November 17, 2011 . August 21, 2013.