TV Show House and Hugh Laurie

Last season, House was my favorite show and Hugh Laurie my favorite man to watch. It was kind of surprising to find such a good show on Fox.

Rhetoric Not Matching Reality

This article shows that at least someone can see that the Emperor has no clothes. Bush is all hat and no cattle, as Texans would say. The US is supposed to be prepared for a devastating emergency -- in the last few years the government has formed a Homeland Security division and spent billions of dollars in preparation for another disaster like 9/11. So what's the deal taking FOUR days to get help to a devastated city and the people of New Orleans. It just doesn't make sense unless somebody, aka the Bush administration, is woefully unprepared to handle reality. Are we safer? Nope. If the administration can't even handle Katrina and the flood, how can they possibly be ready to handle a terrorist attack, when things would be even more chaotic?

Another article from Newsweek illuminates how Bush is more about image than substance. He was sitting at his ranch with his thumb up his butt when one of his advisors must've decided he needed to look like he was actually doing something about Katrina.

The Roots of Racial Profiling

By Anita L. Willis

Ms. Willis is a writer, researcher, and genealogist, and author of the forthcoming book, Notes and Documents of Free Persons of Color: Colonial Virginia, 1650-1850 (March 2003).

Willis's article is thought-provoking and if her book poses similar arguments, I think it would make worthwhile reading. Here's a quote from "The Roots of Racial Profiling".

"Although racial profiling is not backed by written statutes, its roots are in the laws enacted during colonial times. Racial profiling, for want of a better term, is a Gateway Act -- an excuse used to approach citizens assumed to be criminals."

Wilis describes what happened to Mary, a seven-year-old girl in 17th-century Virginia, who was taken to court, judged to be mulatto, and then sentenced to a thirty-year indenture with the Washington family. Willis writes: "Because of her mixed race status, Mary had no rights in her community. Today , because of their appearance and ethnicity, citizens are being stopped, searched, and arrested. Were Mary to return to modern-day America she might pause to wonder if she was in the 18th century, not the 21st."

I think the foregoing is a bit of hyperbole and grossly overstated--does she really see but little difference between the plight of 17th- and 21st-century blacks or mixed race/non-white people in the US? -- yet I think her assertions provide some interesting grist for the mill in our study of the history of race relations in the South.

[Be sure to read the very polemical comments(arguments) asccessible through the link at the bottom of the article page.]

[See also "ANNOUNCEMENT OF BOOK RELEASE - NOTES AND DOCUMENTS OF FREE PERSONS OF COLOR: COLONIAL VIRGINIA 1650-1850 (#5499) by Anita Wills on December 7, 2002". Note that Ms. Willis's book is published by a genealogical publisher, rather than an academic press.]

The Sin of Blasphemy

Pat Robertson gives Christianity a bad name. I used to watch his 700 Club television show decades ago when I couldn't sleep and there was nothing else on TV (pre-cable or -satellite era). Watching it made me lose faith in all of humanity. How could so many million people watch that propagandist drivel week after week and even send this anti-Christ their hard-earned dollars? If the average American (or even a hefty percentage of average Americans) is a supporter of Pat Robertson, then this country is really in a world of hurt.

The Sin of Blasphemy
Pat Robertson’s latest remarks have our columnist wondering: What does it really mean to be Christian?

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Patti Davis
Newsweek; Updated: 3:27 p.m. ET Aug. 23, 2005


Aug. 23, 2005 - Pat Robertson considers himself a man of God, a Christian, a preacher of the Gospel. To all of these aspects of his self-delusion, the only appropriate response is: Huh? His latest suggestion, as this self-proclaimed man of God, is that Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, should be assassinated. On his “700 Club” TV show, Robertson said Chavez could turn Venezuela into a safe haven for Communist and Muslim extremists. "You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," said Robertson, who founded the Christian Coalition. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."

True men of God, of course, do not entertain such notions. They certainly don’t preach them. Men of blasphemy do.

Did Robertson lose his Bible? Or has he simply rewritten it in his own language? What happened to “Thou Shalt Not Kill?” This is not the first time Robertson has expressed a fondness for assassination. In October 2003 he suggested that nuclear weapons be dropped on the State Department.

Have any authorities checked his basement?

Here’s what I’m curious about. How does someone who has wrapped himself in the cloak of Christianity for decades come up with such ideas and express them with such ease? Does he pray first? Does he get on his knees, close his eyes and say, “God, I really want to take a few people out here. I know we’re all supposed to be your children, but there are some bad ones in the bunch and I’m figuring they probably got through by mistake. So how about culling the herd?” And then does he actually imagine God answering him and saying, “Go forth, my child with whatever weapons you can find. If you can’t scrounge up any yourself, spread the word. Preach to the masses. Someone will pick up the sword, pull the trigger or drop the bomb.”

At the risk of sounding quaint, this is just not the God I was raised with, and it certainly isn’t the God who answers me. I close my eyes sometimes and say, “God, I gave someone the finger today when I was driving. I know I shouldn’t have.” And what I hear back is something like, “I saw that. And I’ve told you before, that was a child of mine too. A tailgating one, but my child nonetheless.”

I’m actually feeling a lot better now about my temper flares in traffic. At least I’ve never considered using weaponry.

I’m sure the members of the Christian Coalition won’t take my suggestions, but they might want to consider making a rule that anyone who calls himself a Christian has to have some passing acquaintance with the teachings of Jesus. I’m no Biblical scholar but I am absolutely sure that Jesus never suggested assassinating anyone.

When I lived in New York City, I used to give money to a homeless man who stood on the same corner of Columbus Avenue every day, rain or shine. He was never pushy, he was always polite, and I just felt like giving him money. One day, I saw a man in a business suit getting right in this man’s face, waving a Bible at him and telling him he was a sinner and he had to accept Jesus and ask forgiveness for his sins. I walked up, gave the homeless man a five and said to the sidewalk preacher, “You know, Jesus would never do what you’re doing.” I walked away quickly before he could hit me with his Bible. And I walked away feeling very sorry for Jesus. People keep doing things in his name that are so un-Christianlike.

Well, if I felt sorry for Jesus then, I feel like weeping for him now. Shouldn’t people like Pat Robertson just go start their own religion and leave Jesus out of it?

I found another quote of Robertson’s from several years ago. He said that feminism encourages women “to kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

I would respond to this but I have to go boil some eye of newt, lizard tails and pig blood. And I am so behind on my schedule to bring down the bastions of capitalism. I got delayed because I was flirting with this cute girl down the street.

Davis, the daughter of Nancy and Ronald Reagan, is a writer based in Los Angeles.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com

Resource for understanding DNA testing

Kerchner's DNA Testing & Genetic Genealogy Info and Resources Page

Charles F. Kerchner Jr. offers links to information about understanding DNA and DNA testing, including his recommended reading list of books.

Secret Jews

Many people of Spanish ancestry now living in the Americas are Jews who have hidden their Jewishness since the time of the Spanish Inquisition in order to avoid persecution. DNA can sometimes provide a clue to Jewish origins but in most cases cited in this newspaper article, the secret has been handed down secretly from generation to generation.

DNA Sheds Light on North American Migration

Dental DNA reveals our ancient roots
By Leigh Fenly
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
August 24, 2005

JAMES DIXON
/ University of Colorado, Boulder
A cast of the human jaw found in On Your Knees Cave on Prince of Wales Island in southeastern Alaska. UC Davis researchers have sequenced DNA from two of the teeth - - the oldest ever extracted from ancient American remains [Photo]

Politics plagued bones of Kennewick Man

ASHLAND, Ore. – Paleontologist Timothy Heaton was used to finding 35,000-year-old remains of brown bear, black bear, hoary marmot and antelope in On Your Knees Cave, a tight opening tucked in the dense hemlocks of Alaska's vast Tongass National Forest. But on the last day of excavation in 1996, as Heaton was filling a final bag of sediment, he came upon something quite different.

A lower jaw. A pelvic bone. Obsidian worked into a spear point.

Unmistakable evidence of an ancient human.

Since, the effort to tease clues from the 10,300-year-old remains – the oldest ever found in Alaska or Canada – has involved myriad research laboratories, most recently the Molecular Anthropology Lab at UC Davis.

A tooth from On Your Knees Cave Man – wrapped in cotton and shipped via Federal Express – arrived there in 2003. Brian Kemp, a Ph.D. candidate, removed the tooth's crown and hammered out a quarter-gram portion of root. He subjected it to bleach, a decalcifying chemical and a protein-devouring enzyme. With a silica extraction, he got the tooth's DNA to jump out of the solution.

With the same process forensic scientists use to link DNA to criminals, Kemp tricked the purified DNA into copying itself millions of times. The resulting sequences – the oldest DNA ever extracted from human remains in the Americas – revealed some of the old man's secrets.

Graphic: Kinship with On Your Knees Cave Man

Kemp's analysis, which he will submit to Nature, confirmed the Ice Age remains as male and established his maternal ancestry as Asian.

From differences in the genetic sequences, Kemp is now able to argue that the cave man's DNA represents a new ancient lineage in North America. Comparing that DNA to modern-day sequences, he also is suggesting changes to some scientists' estimates of the time of the first migrations to the New World.

In the months to come, the results will likely be strenuously argued. Less debatable is the fact that Kemp's work gets us closer to understanding who first peopled North America and offers a glimpse at the tantalizing future of genetic anthropology.

The human genome stores vast amounts of information on the movements, relationships and adaptations of past populations. In the last decade, after some embarrassing missteps and exaggerated claims, DNA technology has begun to reveal some of that dormant information.

The promise is huge, says Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences. "As the early problems get solved, we're going to have the framework to learn about relationships among ancient people. DNA is going to answer all our questions about who is related to whom."

DNA's promise

At the moment, Kemp is relating to a cup of coffee. He's joined by his peers: his adviser, David Glenn Smith, the respected director of Davis' Molecular Anthropology lab; Ripan Malhi and Jason Eshleman, former students of Smith's and partners in science and business; and John McDonough, Smith's jovial lab manager.

They are earnest, confident, energized. Smith alone – who brought them all here, literally and figuratively – has a quiet air.

Earlier this morning, each had muscled through PowerPoint presentations describing their work at an American Association for the Advancement of Science seminar at Southern Oregon University in Ashland. Now, in the sleek new, brick library on campus, they are warming to shop talk. Teeth, for instance, and contamination.

JAMES DIXON
/ University of Colorado, Boulder
The entrance to On Your Knees Cave in southeastern Alaska. A lower jaw, some pelvic bones, ribs and backbones of a 10,300-year-old skeleton were excavated from the cave in 1996. [Photo]

The field is so new, it's only now becoming clear that teeth are more likely than bone to give up their DNA. The difficulties recovering any DNA from ancient material are vast, since DNA begins to degrade immediately after death, as water, oxygen and microbes attack it. But teeth, encased in enamel and partly protected by the jaw bone, are turning out to be better harborers of DNA. They have become the prizes in the DNA lab.

"In my 200 samples, I didn't have a single tooth," laments Eshleman, drawing a face.

Malhi ribs him. "Oh, it's OK, Jason."

Eshleman's DNA studies – using bones – are helping make sense of California's huge number of Native American languages. He's also found new evidence of a very early coastal migration down the West Coast.

Similarly, Malhi is using DNA data to measure the impact of European contact on the genetic diversity of Native Americans who populated the Columbia Plateau.

The two have also founded Trace Genetics Inc., in Richmond, a private company that has helped 1,000 people determine their Native American ancestry. For one woman, adopted as a child, this was the first time she'd known for sure: She is Native

In all such work, the single biggest hurdle is defeating contamination. The PCR process, used to create millions of copies of DNA, has been compared to a Xerox machine, although Malhi prefers to call it a "contamination factory." "Lots of times I've done a sampling and gotten my own DNA sequence," he says wryly.

That's because DNA is lying about everywhere. "What is it – we each shed millions of skin cells every day?" wonders McDonough. Each DNA-rich cell – lying on a lab bench, tucked into a glove – is waiting to hook onto an ancient, degraded sample.

In the 1990s, it was contaminated samples that led to false claims for DNA sequences of dinosaurs and million-year-old plants and insects. Smith's lab at Davis, one of the largest in the country, is a model for containment and sterilization processes. Access to the lab is strictly limited. Equipment is bleached and decontaminated on a regular basis. On file are the DNA records of every employee, past and present, to compare to new results.

Whenever possible, Smith recommends duplicating the work. Kemp sequenced a second tooth from On Your Knees Cave Man (OYKCM) in the lab of Malhi and Eshleman. "When it came up the same," he says, "I knew the results were true."

Mother lode

To follow this conversation for long you need a vocabulary word: mitochondrial DNA.

Most people are familiar with nuclear DNA – our genes that come to us courtesy of our mother and father, when the sperm fertilizes the egg and both sets of genes mix.

As a tool for genetic anthropologists, nuclear DNA is troublesome because all that reshuffling of genes makes it tough to trace a direct genetic line from individual to individual.

But the mitochondria, the cell's energy-producing bodies, also have tiny genomes, and these are inherited only from our mothers. Because there is no mixing with male genes, Smith explains, mitochondrial DNA stays the same from generation to generation, except when random mutations occur.

And mitochondrial DNA is abundant in cells compared to nuclear DNA and therefore more likely to be extracted. It will never be enough to clone an early cave man, but for Kemp, Smith and other genetic anthropologists, mitochondrial DNA is the mother lode.

"This is what's allowing us to construct a history where there is no written record," Smith says.

The reason they can do this is because the rate of mutation in mitochondrial DNA remains constant over time – in each individual, from prehistory to modern-day, changes occur at the same rate. That rate of change is used as a measuring stick for time known as the molecular clock.

To make sense of all the mutations, scientists group individuals with similar sets of mutations into families known as haplogroups. Haplogroups are further divided into smaller groups called haplotypes. OYKCM belongs to haplotype D, one of five founding lineages that appear in North America. But his haplotype is rare.

"When I first saw it, I wasn't sure what I was looking at," Kemp says. "He was D-something else."

The D-something-else genetic sequence is like a fingerprint of inherited mutations. Kemp wanted to find out if anyone living today had anything similar. From a genetic database of 3,500 Native Americans, he found 47 individuals living in North and South America who belong to the same haplotype. These are the cave man's relatives, inheritors of his same fingerprint of mutations.

The 47 are widely spread, from California to Tierra del Fuego. Some belong to California's Chumash tribe, Ecuador's Cayapa tribe and the Tarahumara in Mexico. This wide dispersal is an important clue to the geographic reach of the cave man's family and the migratory routes they might have taken.

Beyond migration questions, haplogroup studies can indicate conquest, assimilation and language development – filling in a broad canvas with small strokes. "It's easy to get seduced by the big questions," says Smith, "but what we're interested in are the smaller questions of what happened after the peopling of the New World. We're interested in the intricacies."

One example is Eshleman's studies showing haplotype A occurring primarily in British Columbia and the Channel Islands – suggesting an early southerly migration along the West Coast.

Mitochondrial DNA creates a partial record, to be sure, because it only traces female populations. (The male trademark Y chromosome is notoriously difficult to sequence in ancient samples, although Kemp was lucky to identify it in OYKCM.)

Even so, DNA data may clarify the contentious debate surrounding the timing of the first migrations to the New World.

Parallel dates

Here Kemp has tread, too.

In the late 1990s, scientists used DNA studies to propose that people first advanced upon the continent from Asia as much as 40,000 years ago. But data from numerous archaeological sites across the Americas have placed the migration at closer to 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Kemp has used OYKCM as a measuring stick to come up with dates much closer to the archaeological record. "Because we know that this guy represents the oldest known example of this lineage, that places a minimum date on the emergence of the lineage," he explains.

In other words, OYKCM represents one end of the measuring stick. At the other end are the 47 people who belong to his haplotype. According to the rules of the molecular clock, this makes it possible to measure the genetic changes between OYKCM and the modern samples and calculate the time it would have required for those changes to occur.

"My calibration shows that the changes were occurring two to four times faster than previously thought," Kemp says. "It means some people have overestimated the time. It wasn't so long ago."

That makes some of his colleagues wrong – and previous DNA data flawed – but Kemp is satisfied. "I hope the impact of my paper will be to bring the molecular timing more in line with the archaeological record," he says. "This is what you want your work to do."
{The orginal article has a great map showing probably migration patterns based on DNA matches]

Mitochondrial Eve

This is the discussion page about the Mitochondrial Eve entry on Wikipedia, addressing some of the issues in constructing an accurate entry.

Kinship Studies

Much of my work is based on kinship theory, mostly from the field of anthropology.

A site by Tim Roufs -- "Cultural Anthropology" (University of Minnesota at Duluth) -- has good basic definitions for kinship terms and groups. It has an index to Marriage, Kinship, and Descent. There are no doubt many others with this type of information, but this is the first one I came across when I was looking for good general information. I'll add more as I find them.

Went to attorney

Went to visit an attorney in Benton this afternoon, about suing the pool contractors. I'm quite stressed out now.

But at least I have electricity.

Billingsley Lane didn't get power back until 4:30 this morning. Sarah said there were four big trucks and lots of loud men outside her house in the middle of the night, so she and Carrie gave up on sleeping (it was too hot anyway) and went and sat on the front porch to watch the show. When they replaced the fuse on the pole, it made a big explosion, with a shower of sparks. So they had to send another crew out to replace the transformer. Blew out her computer, her garage door openers, her fax, and her AC. J fixed her AC this morning though, so at least she stayed cool today.

My grandson Jeff found the missing cow after school today, and got into plenty of brambles in his search. She was well hidden. But she had her calf OK. Four of the five cows have calved and all four have been bulls. Shoots the law of averages to bits (yeah, yeah, I know all the reasons statistics don't work that way; and maybe next year we'll have five heifers). We'll definitely be eating home-grown, organically raised beef this time next year. (In case you don't know, you castrate the bull calves and either sell them or feed them out for beef; you raise the heifers to increase your herd. Unless you don't think they have the makings of a good cow, in which case you sell them too. End of cow lesson.)

I got a call in the middle of the night (yes, I was still up) that my Dad had activated his Life Alert button. Turns out he had chest pains and irregular heartbeat, so the paramedics took him to the ER, but once they got his heart beating right, he refused to stay and went home. Says he's OK today. But he was talking about re-making his will. (My brother told my father not to leave anything to him because he didn't need it and I did.) So that's probably not a good sign. I wonder how I'll feel when my father dies. I don't even LIKE the man, but people tell me it'll still affect me. Curious.

Nothing else new. (Actually, me being stressed isn't new either.)

Fucking Rotten Day

Fucking rotten day. Had to go check on a cow who's about to have a calf, but couldn't find her after 45 minutes of searching (they go off and hide to give birth). I knew she was somewhere deep in the woods where it's swampy and I wasn't about to put on my hip boots in this heat and go tromping around amongst the chiggers and ticks to track her down. I hope she had her damn calf safely. Should've shut her up in the lot by the barn but I knew she'd be unhappy about it.

Then a big storm blew in, for which I was initially grateful, but we only got .25" of rain in the deal, all in less than 30 minutes, while the lightning struck all around (made my phones ring every time one hit close by, which was about 10 times), blew a big limb across the road to my house, washed out part of the road to my house (again). That amount of rain only delays the worsening of the drought. Settled the dust for about an hour and that's all.

And then the power went off. And it stayed off until 10 PM. I was cut off from the WWW. It was awful. The power was off only at our end of the road. I went up about five houses down the road and THEY had power. The farm is the end of the line. The people to the north and west of us had power because they're on Benton electricity instead of Little Rock. The people up on the highway had power. Just this little patch of folks out in the hinterlands were powerless. I put in underground utilities all over the farm but it doesn't save my from the exposed power lines further up the road.

The sky stayed black for the rest of the day even after it quit raining and I couldn't even see to read. Had to go sit in the car and read a book, until J made me get out and go to Home Depot and Wal-Mart, so at least I got those chores done.

But then it was really dark. I was trying to read the newspaper by candlelight and it's a wonder I didn't catch myself on fire. Finally I gave up on that and went swimming. At least there I could light a couple of torches and have a little light, although I had to use a flashlight to change into my bathing suit in the pool house.Finally I saw the gate lights come on across the pasture, so I knew I could go home.

Funny thing is, everybody got power back except Billingsley Lane, which is just J and my daughter Sarah. He was pissed -- still didn't have power at 11 PM. I wonder if they'll send somebody back out on overtime for just two customers?

So I pretty much lost the whole day. Except for getting my grocery shopping done at Wal-Mart and buying some new light fixtures for my house at Home Depot.

Why Do Men Have Nipples?

"Why Do Men Have Nipples?: Hundreds of Questions You?d Only Ask A Doctor After Your Third Martini," published by Three Rivers Press. Funny interview with one of the authors.

Putative Paternity/Non-Paternity Events

As many as one in twenty-five men are not the fathers of the children they think are theirs.

Could be that dad is not real father, report shows (Thursday August 11, 2005)
Paternity Study Finds Daddy Discrepancies (Thursday, August 11, 2005), By Miranda Hitti. SOURCE: Bellis, M. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Sept. 2005; vol 59: pp 749-754. News release, BMJ.

Even if a man proves he's a child's biological father, it doesn't necessarily trump the rights of the legal or social father. Here's one example from The Waukesha Freeman written by BRIAN HUBER
"Supreme Court denies paternity to biological father; Child born of adultery remains with her marital dad." April 8, 2004, Waukesha, Wisconsin, U.S.A.

Eating Wiener Schnitzel in Graz, Austria, 1996

Biographical Sketch

Biographical Sketch: Carolyn Earle Billingsley
18 February 2004

In 1948, Carolyn Earle Billingsley was born in Texas, into a military family with roots in Arkansas. She married James L. Billingsley in 1967 and had four children by the time she was twenty-three. Since 1973, she and her family have lived in Saline County, Arkansas, the same county to which one of her paternal 5-greatgrandfathers, Thomas Keesee Sr., migrated in 1836, and to which her maternal 3-greatgrandfather, Martin Gantt, and 2-greatgrandfather, John Wittenburg Sr., migrated in the 1870s.

Shortly before she was thirty, her great-uncle’s family papers were bequeathed to her, beginning a lifetime fascination with family history. Billingsley became a professional genealogist and, in 1986 was one of the three founders of the Saline County (Arkansas) History and Heritage Society, also serving as treasurer and editor of the quarterly for this organization for its first five years. Other activities during the 1980s and -90s include serving as board member, vice-president, program chair, and president of the Arkansas Genealogical Society; lecturing and speaking state-wide on genealogical methodology; co-founding (with Desmond Walls Allen) the Professional Genealogists of Arkansas organization and serving as co-editor of the newsletter; and authoring a number of genealogical publications, some in partnership with Allen.

After spending the 70s and 80s playing the role of suburban mom to the hilt, she enrolled as a forty-one-year-old freshman at University of Arkansas at Little Rock in January of 1990, when her therapist suggested Billingsley had procrastinated long enough in attending college, especially now that her children were essentially grown.

Before she completed her first semester at UALR, she was on scholarship, and by the second semester, she was accepted into the Donaghey Scholars Program (UALR’s honors program). At the time of her graduation, summa cum laude, with a BA in history and minors in German and Arkansas Studies in May of 1994, Billingsley had been the recipient of two UALR Phi Alpha Theta Research Paper first place awards, the Powell History Scholarship, the award for Best Family History in a Local or County Journal (Arkansas Historical Association), the Booker Worthen Memorial Award, the Stolthz Plaque for Outstanding Senior, a Phi Kappa Phi National Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship for study at Karl-Franzens Universität, Graz, Austria. Billingsley was also listed in Who's Who in Genealogy and Heraldry (1990), Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and College (1993), and The National Dean's List, 1992-93.

After spending two years studying German translation, old German handwriting, and Austrian history at Karl-Franzens Universität in Graz, Austria, Billingsley moved to Houston, Texas, where she attended graduate school on a fellowship from Rice University. During her five years at Rice, Billingsley was an editorial intern at the Journal of Southern History and at the Jefferson Davis Papers. She received her MA in 1998 and her Ph.D. in Southern History in 2001.

Over the years, Billingsley has presented papers or served as moderator for the Arkansas Historical Society Annual Meeting (Hot Springs, 1990, and Benton, 2001); Phi Alpha Theta Regional Conference (Memphis, Tennessee, 1992); Galveston Historical Foundation Symposium (1998); East Texas Historical Association Fall Meeting, (Nacogdoches, Texas, 1999); and Houston Area Southern Historians ( 2000).

She has also published papers and/or book reviews in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, The Alabama Review: A Quarterly Journal of Alabama History, Arkansas Family Historian, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, East Texas Historical Quarterly, Arkansas Biography, Pulaski County Historical Review, Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly, The Jefferson County Historical Quarterly, Professional Genealogists of Arkansas Newsletter, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, and The Saline.

Billingsley is also a graduate of Samford University's Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research, Course V–Genealogy as a Profession (1989) and over the years has attended five NGS National Conferences.

Billingsley is the author of a book based on her dissertation, published in 2004 by the University of Georgia Press. Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier is a study based on over seven thousand individuals connected by kinship to the author’s Keesee family, which argues for the incorporation of genealogical methodology into historical research on migration, settlement patterns, political and economic power, and religion, and for the acceptance of kinship as a category of analysis in the study of antebellum southern society. The book won the 2005 Booker Worthen Litery Prize.

Billingsley now lives in Alexander, Arkansas, and works as an independent historian, professional genealogist, and manager of her family’s land. She is the Course Coordinator for Course 3: Research in the South, at Samford University's Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research in Birmingham, Alabama. She currently serves on the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies Advisory Board, and is a life member of the Arkansas Genealogical Society, the National Genealogy Society, the Southern Historical Association, and the Arkansas Historical Association. Seven wonderful grandchildren, ranging from 8 months to 12 years grace her life.

She walked into the water

She walked into the water, deeper and deeper, feeling gravity falling away with each step. Finally she floated free in the water. Unmoving she waited for the water to still.

She sank downward until only her nose and her eyes were above the water. The last of the dying wavelets reflected the flickering firelight of the torch like liquid gold lightly blended into the water, soothingly illuminating the darkness of the night. The underwater lights created waving stria of blues and greens, bringing a shimmering florescence to the water in which she floated.

Alone under the night sky, with only the fireflies and stars to keep her company, she waited for her body and mind to mesh with the tranquility of her watery haven. Finally, when all was still, she gathered a bit of air into her lungs and sank down into the water.

Coolness and diffusion enveloped and embraced her. All sound muffled, all senses muted. Her thoughts floated free of logic and reality and only knew the calm serenity of the sensuous liquid to which she gave herself. Her long red hair fanned around her, gently undulating in what seemed like the rhythm of her slowing heartbeat.

She could only imagine dwelling endlessly in this suspension—the harshness of the world above and beyond her, outside of her liquid cocoon. All sounds distant and far away, the gentle resonance of her body’s inner cadences overriding all other aural intrusions, she drifted in a reverie of peace and calm, tinged with longing.

Opening her eyes beneath the water, she glimpsed the outside world as if through a wavering mirage. All so distant, when seen from this side of the surface, as if she were only a friendly but unseen observer of the shadowy affairs of humankind.

Regret rose in her awakening senses as she was forced to reenter that other, harsher world for wont of air to breathe.

9 August 2005

She awoke with a start

She awoke with a start of terror, totally unlike her usual reluctantly gradual awakening. Her flight or fight mechanism was working overtime even though, as she found herself jolted from the nightmare she discovered herself cozily ensconced in her own bed, inside her own house, within the confines of the gated compound, presumably safe.

As she consciously tried to slow her breathing and heart rate, she realized what had triggered this latest episode. Her mind relentlessly threw itself back to the previous day when she had been exercising at Curves.

Her thighs screamed as she leveraged the weighted ankle stirrups up, time after time from her seated position, totally unable to keep up with the rapid beat of the fast-paced disco music.

Only thirty seconds per machine, only thirty seconds per machine, her inner dialogue reminded her. It’ll end any second now, just before I totally run out of gas .Thank god the calm woman’s recorded voice finally broke through the music to direct them all to “move to the next station.”

She groaned as she realized the next machine was the worst one—surely Satan’s construction. She positioned her shoulders under the large padded weights and resigned herself to doing way too many squats in the next thirty seconds, pushing against a resistance that seemed maniacally sadistic rather than inert uncaring steel and leather. She concentrated on using the proper form so she wouldn’t strain something and publicly collapse in ignominy.

As she leveled her shoulders and raised her head to look straight ahead, she was staring without thought through the big plate glass windows in the front of the business. Her eyes caught a glimpse of the man in the parking lot as he walked to a car. All her breath left her and it felt as if her heart totally stopped in her chest.

No, no—it’s not him. Something about his appearance just reminds me of him.

Suddenly she was in front of the house where she used to live, struggling to get away from this man who had grabbed her arm and wouldn’t let go. The knife at her throat. Being dragged to his car and pushed into the floorboard on the passenger side. The terror stopping her brain from functioning with any kind of reliability. Being pulled into the woods, still not sure what he was going to do to her. Him brandishing the knife, carving marks into a nearby tree as if to demonstrate his intentions for her body, full of his own power, then slicing through her bra and panties with obvious relish, creating a picture in her mind of that knife going through her living flesh instead of inanimate objects. His body forcing itself on her, stripping her of every shred of control over her own life. The sure knowledge that he was speaking the truth when he said he’d have to kill her and hide her body. The numbed relief when she was dumped by the side of a deserted road. Not physically harmed.

“Did you hear the voice saying it was time to move to the next station?”

She snapped out of the flashback and realized it was the dumpy little blonde to her right, impatiently waiting to change machines. I must have been standing here in a daze. For how long? Only thirty seconds or so? Seems like hours.

Barely realizing what she was doing, she moved automatically to the next machine. Just a hint of resemblance and it’s as if it’s happening right now, even twenty-five years later. Evidently it would never totally leave her in peace.

By the time she’d relived the experience yet again that next morning, her body finally began to unclench as she put the memories back in the compartment where they lived. Not that they’ll stay there, she thought with a shuddering sigh.

She threw back the covers and began another day.

Review Essay: Melungeons

Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia. By Wayne Winkler. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2004. Pp.xx, 314. Illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, index. $34.00.)

Edited version published The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 102, No. 2 (Spring 2004): 207-223.

Review Essay
By Carolyn Earle Billingsley

In the fall of 1869, a wagon train formed in Pickens County, South Carolina. The large group, connected by kinship, community, and church membership, were heading for Saline County, Arkansas, to make a fresh start. Many of their young men had lost their lives in the war and there were few opportunities or available arable land in their mountainous homeland on the North Carolina border. One of the women in this migrating group was my great-great-grandmother Terrissa (Gantt) Chappell Jeans. Her husband had been killed in the Civil war, leaving her a widow with three children, and she had just remarried to a man named William Jeans[1]. Soon afterwards, Terrissa gave birth to their daughter, Lucinda Jeans. But during the trip to Arkansas, according to family stories, Mr. Jeans was verbally and physically abusive to Terrissa and her family ran him off. They never saw him again.

Family lore also states that Terrissa’s daughter, my great-grandmother Lucinda, who grew up in Saline County, Arkansas, was a pretty little girl with dark eyes and hair; Even her complexion was noticeably dark—sometimes described as “olive” by those who knew her. She and her family had an explanation for her darkness: her father, they said, was Spanish. On various census records through the years, Lucinda reported her father’s place of birth as Mexico or Spain and his native language as Spanish.[2]

Spanish? From the hills of Pickens County, South Carolina, in the 1860s? With a name like William Jeans? Not likely.

Another explanation from the family was that the Gantts, Lucinda’s maternal ancestors, were “Black Dutch”. Today nobody knows what that term meant (or means) to the many families who claim this heritage. Some theories: they were German people who were dark instead of blond; they were Germans from the Black Forest region; or “Sephardic Jews who married Dutch protestants to escape the Inquisition.”[3]

Explanations citing Spanish or Black Dutch ancestry for this family are especially suspect when one considers that Gantt/Jeans descendants have a significant percentage of Native American ancestry. This fact, however, was not revealed until recently, when extensive DNA testing shed light on this portion of my lineage.[4]

In talking to older and now-deceased family members, I long ago discovered that, previous to the last few decades, the “white” population of the dominant southern culture considered being Indian pert nigh the same as being “black” (although this opinion usually was not rendered in language now considered politically correct by any means), and therefore, it was something to be concealed rather than celebrated. In addition to being the wrong color, Native Americans were frequently subject to hostility because of the ongoing warfare between whites and Indians on the frontier, and because many tribes freely intermarried with blacks. Therefore, Native Americans or those with partial Native American ancestry “passed” for white when they could and purposely obscured their Indian ancestry.[5]

Of course, in the minds of most people, “passing” involves African-Americans. For example, ex-slave Wallace Turnage kept a journal of his life, which was for years kept among his daughter’s possessions. When the daughter, Lydia Turnage Connolly, died, a neighbor ended up with the handwritten account and only then did the neighbor discover Connolly’s African-American ancestry: “Mrs. Connolly often described herself as ‘Portugee’ to explain her dark complexion.”[6]

In his book Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920, Willard B. Gatewood relates similar stories of the deliberate obfuscation of origins. When Dr. J. Frank McKinley married Maud Cuney in 1898, he was adamant that they pass as Spanish-Americans and claimed that heritage for their daughter on her birth certificate, although they were both of mixed black and white ancestry, with no Spanish antecedents. And when Fannie Barrier Williams, who was also of African-American ancestry, was questioned about her ethnicity by the conductor of the whites-only railroad car in which she rode, she replied, “Je suis Français,” later explaining that “the ‘barbarous laws’ of the South ‘did not allow a lady to be both comfortable and honest’.”[7]

Although most such stories about Spanish or Portuguese (or even French) family origins are told by individuals or nuclear families, there is a particular group that asserts these types of origins for their entire people: they are called Melungeons and their ethnic and racial background is a matter of fierce debate. In her book The Melungeons [Notes on the Origin of a Race], Bonnie Ball describes them thusly:

Two generations ago, people traveling through certain ranges of the Cumberlands
might meet or overtake a group of mountaineers trudging along single-file,
making their way to homes concealed in remote hollows and glens. They were
mountaineers, but there was a difference between them and their white neighbors.
They little resembled the Anglo-Saxons, the Scotch-Irish, the Germans, or even
the so-called “black Dutch” . . . . They were dark-skinned, but little about
them resembled Italians or Mexicans. . . .
. . . In some ways they
reminded people of certain Indian tribes, yet they had other characteristics
that suggested a mixture of many races. For example, some of them had the dark
skin and curly hair typical of blacks, but even so seldom possessed black facial
features. . . .
. . . Their skin was dark and oily, showing more of a
coppery color than of, say, Ethiopians or darker members of the white race.
Their hair was often coarse and black, and in some families extremely kinked.
Others were little different from their white neighbors. . . .[8]

Explanations for their ancestral or ethnic origins are almost as numerous as the articles and books discussing them, but, as a rule, the people themselves claimed to be of "Portyghee" (Portuguese) ancestry, descended from shipwrecked sailors, and from the Cherokee or other Native American groups.

Despite the controversies, there are many points of agreement among those who have studied the Melungeon folk. They are centered in the Newman’s Ridge area of Hancock County, Tennessee, where they settled in the 1790s, apparently migrating from areas around Ashe County, North Carolina. Nobody knows the source of the name Melungeon; speculation is that it derives from the French mélange (mixed), the Greek melan (black or dark), the old English word malengin (mischievous intent), or even the Afro-Portuguese melungo (shipmate), but other name theories are bandied about. Within the Melungeon community, there are several common surnames, such as Collins, Gibson or Gipson, Mullins and Goins, which have persisted throughout known Melungeon history. They kept to themselves for the most part, intermarrying and living in marginal areas in neighborhoods that were not significantly integrated into the wider communities of their residential areas. Many stories indicate that white southerners considered them to be non-white and, accordingly, they were stigmatized. Moreover they have been consistently stereotyped as lazy, immoral, illiterate, thievish, superstitious, clannish half-breeds.[9]

But beyond these basic facts, any discussion of Melungeons is highly polarized: the main bone of contention is their racial or ethnic identity, predicated on their ancestral origin. Anthropologists refer to them as a tri-racial isolate group, meaning that they are considered to be a mixture of three races—white, black, and Native American (or, as a resident of Hancock County once put it, “a mix of ‘white trash, renegade Indians, and runaway slaves”[10]), and that they tend to cluster together and keep to themselves. Another technical term is for such a group is “racial island”. Many researchers from within the Melungeon community posit descent from Portuguese sailors marooned in North American or even Moors, Turks, or some type of Mediterranean people, mixed with Indian ancestry.

The Melungeons are only one of the tri-racial groups found mainly in the South and along the Eastern Seaboard. Although the other major racial islands are often lumped together with the Melungeons, distinct groups include the Brass Ankles (South Carolina), Cajans and Creoles (Alabama and Mississippi), Croatans (North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia), Guineas (West Virginia and Maryland), Issues (Virginia), Jackson Whites (New Jersey and New York), Red Bones (Louisiana), Moors and Nanticokes (Delaware and New Jersey), and the Wesorts (Southern Maryland). The origins of all these groups and others like them are obscured but they are believed by scholars to be, like the Melungeons, a mixture of white, black, and Native American, and many of their members, like the Melungeons, claim Portuguese, Moorish, and/or Indian ancestry.[11]

A great deal of information about the Melungeons and other tri-racial isolate groups can be found in academic journals over the last century, read for the most part by scholars and thus outside of mainstream American consciousness. In 1972, Calvin L. Beale wrote that “Interest in the racial isolates by anthropologists began in the late nineteenth century, stimulated . . . by the emergence of the Robeson County, North Carolina, people as Croatan Indians and the suggestion of their descent from the Lost Colony.”[12] Public interest, from outside of the scholarly community, has been increasing in the last few decades, for the most part due to interest from genealogists who want to know more about their family background. Additionally, throughout the history of these people, magazine and newspaper articles have periodically stirred up interest in them. For the most part, the authors of these articles portrayed Melungeons in a very uncomplimentary light and virtually always brought up the issue of African-American ancestry. Considering the times in which these articles appeared, the latter issue was extraordinarily harmful to anyone deemed Melungeon.

In recent years, the most popular book about Melungeons, and the one that brought the topic into more widespread awareness, is N. Brent Kennedy’s The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People—An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America.[13] Kennedy is the most public face of the Melungeon community today. Mercer University Press, his publisher, has undertaken a whole series of works on Melungeons with Kennedy as the series editor, and, on their website, refers to Kennedy as “the foremost writer and lecturer on the Melungeons.”[14] Although The Melungeons is considered to be the main reference for this group of people and despite the fact it was widely and positively reviewed, its polemical nature and unsubstantiated claims should give the serious researcher pause. The use of the loaded term “ethnic cleansing” in the title is a clue to the over-wrought viewpoint presented in Kennedy’s text. Often discriminated against, marginalized, disdained and despised—yes; the victims of ethnic cleansing—no.[15]

Kennedy’s main claim for the Melungeons is that their ancestry is Mediterranean, e.g., Turkish, Moorish, Iberian, Berber, and “at least partial Jewish origins,” mixed with Native American.[16] Whereas some other groups designated tri-racial isolates “increasingly considered themselves more Indian than European,” Kennedy says, “ . . . the ‘Melungeons’ of Tennessee and Virginia clung more tightly to their Mediterranean roots.”[17] But Kennedy apparently has nothing but scorn for those who would stigmatize Melungeons by affixing the tri-racial isolate label to them. “To shove all multiethnic people into this generic pigeonhole and assign to them a racial label in which they have no input—which is that the tri-racial isolate theory inadvertently did—is an incredibly hostile action,” which Kennedy also deems “patroniz[ing].”[18] Much more could be written about the faults of this work if Virginia Easley DeMarce had not already quite capably eviscerated Kennedy’s book in her review essay in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.[19]
DeMarce, formerly a history professor, is another prominent researcher of Melungeons. Her works on this mysterious group include two extremely well researched and articulated articles in the NGSQ. In the first, “’Verry Slitly Mixt’: Tri-Racial Isolate Families of the Upper South—A Genealogical Study,” she delves into a variety of tri-racial groups, including their origins and racial compositions. In her follow-up article, “Looking at Legends—Lumbee and Melungeon: Applied Genealogy and the Origins of Tri-racial Isolate Settlements,” DeMarce concentrates on the specific groups of Melungeons and Lumbees. In both articles, DeMarce starts with a base of historical, anthropological, and sociological knowledge and theory, and then cements it all together using genealogical research to trace specific families and their origins, debunking some aspects of scholarship, while proving others to be more consistent with historical fact. For those interested in Melungeons and other tri-racial isolate groups, Demarce’s work stands as one of the most comprehensive, well-researched and -reasoned sources.[20]

Another source for information about Melungeon is Bonnie Ball’s very readable book, The Melungeons. Ball was an elementary school teacher whose interest in Melungeons derived from her personal knowledge of them, both from her childhood and from her classroom. Although she did not write in a scholarly fashion, i.e., there are no footnotes, her recapitulation of the scholarship on Melungeons references her sources within the narrative. She also included a helpful list of suggested reading and was obviously knowledgeable about her topic. Ball’s book is most valuable for the sense of the Melungeon people as she knew them; in other words, she does not malign them and she brings them alive for her reader—more alive than the countless scholarly works portray them.

In 2004, Mercer University Press published a new book in its ongoing series on Melungeon culture, edited by Brent Kennedy. Wayne Winkler’s Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia promises to be the best of the series for its straight-forward, comprehensive, objective, and non-polemical review of the stories of, and theories about, Melungeons and their origins. In Kennedy’s foreword, he writes that “Winkler’s book presents a fair and balanced account of what we know, and do not know, of these fascinating people and his own insights flesh out in a logical manner what much of the extant evidence tells us,” despite the fact that he and Winkler “disagree on a number of topics.”[21]

Winkler, like so many who write on this subject, is himself of Melungeon descent. He works as the director of a public radio station, wrote and produced “an award-winning radio documentary of the Melungeons, and is president of the Melungeon Heritage Association.” Winkler’s goal for his book is to even-handedly gather together and present the theories and research on his people, from which he draws reasonable conclusions whenever it is possible to do so. As he states, he “do[es] not have a theory of origin . . . to promote.” And this is what makes Walking Toward the Sunset a thoroughly satisfying treatise on Melungeons—in a field overwhelmed with strident points of view and far-fetched theories, Winkler’s book is a breath of fresh air. Although Melungeon heritage was at one time “shameful, something to be hidden,” Winkler thoughtfully debunks the “notion of ‘race’” and joyfully embraces his “‘mysterious’ background.” “America has had an unhealthy obsession with race and the notion of ‘purity’,” he asserts, but “[t]he Melungeon story is a celebration of the diversity of America.”[22]

Winkler titles his first chapter “A Raceless People” and explores the question of race as it pertains to Melungeons, telling the story of the inability of society to fit them into a particular racial category. But American society, and southern society in particular, had no trouble deciding that, whatever the Melungeons were, they were not “white”, which resulted in challenges for them in voting, in education, in marriage, in military service, and in all the ways non-whites were disadvantaged by the dominant white culture. For this very reason, it made sense for Melungeons to assert their Portuguese or even Indian ancestry and to reject the idea of African-American ancestry, while also refusing to apply the epithet “Melungeon” to their own people. As Winkler states: “The history of nearly all tri-racial groups has been marked by their efforts to overcome their inferior social status.”[23]

Winkler also points out that it did not and does not really matter if Melungeons or other tri-racial groups actually had African-American blood, whether the proverbial one drop or more; the pertinent and overarching fact is that their neighbors believed that they did and thus treated them accordingly. Melungeons assertions of Portuguese ancestry and descent from sailors shipwrecked on American shores was an understandable coping mechanism, and perhaps even true, but it fell on deaf ears.[24]

In his second chapter, “Race and Conquest on the Eastern Seaboard,” Winkler reviews early contact between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, and the settlement of the eastern seaboard, particularly relating to the varied theories of Melungeon origin. He retells the story of Raleigh’s Lost Colony in some detail, along with the importation of Armenian and Turkish workers to Virginia in the seventeenth century, the presence of the Romany people (Gypsies), the intermarriage of Native Americans and free blacks, and the presence of Spanish and Portuguese sailors. Winkler concludes:

As the English consolidated their hold on North America, the contributions of
these individuals and families of non-English origin were often overlooked or
forgotten. The racial attitudes of the dominant English society forced many of
these swarthy or mixed-race people to keep a low profile, band together in
extended family groups, and often to migrate to more sparsely-populated areas
where racially-restrictive laws had not yet been enacted.[25]

The narrative continues as Winkler examines the historic references to the Melungeons and to people who might have been the original Melungeons, up to and including their settlement on Newman’s Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee. At that time, he writes, “they considered themselves white people with Indian ancestry,” although “[t]hat opinion was not universally shared by their white neighbors, and their legal status would be questioned repeatedly.” During the nineteenth-century, Melungeons came under increasing scrutiny: more disparaging stories about them were published; their right to vote was challenged; court cases were fought to determine their status—and they were forced to negotiate their racial identity. In the precedent-setting “Celebrated Melungeon Case” of 1872, Melungeons were found to be Carthaginian with no African-American blood. [26]

Winkler devotes his third chapter to Will Allen Dromgoole, a woman writer who was responsible in large part for forming the general public’s opinion of Melungeons through a series of articles she wrote in the 1890s. Writing her popular stories about these strange people in a time when “America was obsessed with race,” Dromgoole portrayed them so negatively and in such a racist light, that “[t]o this day, many Hancock Countians resent the articles” she wrote.[27]

In “Scientific Racism,” Winkler’s fourth chapter, he moves the story into the early twentieth century, cogently detailing the effects of eugenics and the progressive movement on the Melungeon people. From Darwin, to Galton, to Kellogg, and even Hitler, Winkler describes the rise of eugenics, which “provided a pseudo-scientific rationale for the ethnic hostility that was gaining momentum in the United States.” Virginia’s Racial Integrity Law of 1924 and publication of books like Mongrel Virginians added to the frenzy over racial classification and had a deleterious impact on the status of Melungeons.[28]

In his chapter titled “A Time of Transition,” Winkler examines the situation of the Melungeons and other tri-racial groups from the 1930s through the 1970s. At the beginning of this period, more articles appeared, retelling the unflattering old tales of the mysterious Melungeons. Of special note is “Sons of the Legend,” which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1947. Not only did W. L. Worden’s piece portray the Melungeons as moon-shining, non-Caucasian, child-bride marrying misfits, it did so in a popular magazine with a nationwide readership—“[a]nd the people of Hancock County were not happy with what [Worden] had to say.”[29] From there, Winkler moves on to the rise of more scholarly research, the reclassification of many tri-racial isolate groups as Indian tribes, the Civil Rights movement, the outmigration of Melungeons from their traditional homelands, and their assimilation into broader American society. By the 1970s, though a combination of the Civil Rights movement, the appearance of a sympathetic portrayal in a popular book, and the debut of the outdoor drama Walk Toward the Sunset in Hancock County, those with Melungeon heritage began to complete the arc from shame to pride in their identity.

In his sixth chapter, Winkler brings the state of Melungeon research up to date. In many ways, “Into the Twenty-First Century” is the meat of the book. Winkler discusses the theoretical and rhetorical divide between Kennedy and his backers versus DeMarce, Henige, and others of like mind, discusses the role of the Internet in popularizing Melungeon research, then segues into the DNA evidence. Although the DNA findings move forward our knowledge about the Melungeon ancestry, they do not settle all aspects of the controversy. Winkler summarizes the results, which were based on a very small sample:

In short, the DNA study indicates today’s Melungeons are primarily of European
descent, with some Native American and African-American ancestry. Some
Melungeons have genetic sequences matching the Siddis of northern India, others
reflect a Turkish or Syrian ancestry. Some of those who consider themselves
“Melungeon” possess all of those “exotic” genes; others have some of them—and
others reflect only the “generic” European genes. The Melungeons are by no means
uniform in their genetic backgrounds; they are a mixed-ethnic population with
varying degrees of mixture within that population.[30]

In his concluding chapter, Winkler speculates on the many ways the data on Melungeons might be interpreted and attempts to define who is and who is not Melungeon. He opines that the recognition of the Melungeon’s varied ethic heritage and the history of discrimination against them “will probably lead to a fuller understanding of America’s tumultuous history of race relations and the absurdity of the concept of race in general.”[31]

So, how should we interpret the many obfuscations, legends, and family origin stories of the Melungeons and other tri-racial isolate groups—and, indeed, for the many individuals who claimed Spanish, Portuguese, and Moorish backgrounds? Were there really that many families of exotic ancestry in the South? If not, why would so many people claim such ancestry?

Occam's razor is a logical principle asserting that simpler models are more apt to be correct than complex ones. The simplest explanation for the complicated legends surrounding the Melungeons and other such groups is rooted in the South’s deterministic racial ideology. Unlike some others areas, such as South America, the Caribbean, and New Orleans, Louisiana, there were only two racial castes in most of the South: one was either white or one wasn’t. The penalties for those who were deemed not-white were severe; the benefits for those who were white were many-fold. But this two-race cosmology failed to account for the reality: a great many people are a varied ethnic mix. And a “common characteristic of tri-racials [and other individuals like my great-grandmother] . . . [is] a tendency to ascribe their origin to migrations in the distant past.” “Invariably the story is told—but rarely believed—that their distant ancestors reached these shores by some accident; and the monotonous theme of shipwrecked sailors recurs again and again.”[32]

In 1872, attorney Lewis Shepherd fought and won a case validating the marriage between a white man and a Melungeon woman by “proving” the Melungeons had no Negro blood whatsoever and were, in fact, “pure-blooded Carthagenians.” Of his assertions in this case, he wrote:

“[O]ur Southern high-bred people . . . will never tolerate on equal terms any
person who is even remotely tainted with negro blood, but they do not make the
same objection to other brown or dark-skinned people, like the Spanish, the
Cubans, the Italians, etc.”[33]

Shepherd’s observation pretty nearly sums up the plight of the Melungeons, as well as other tri-racial groups, African-Americans, Native Americans, and my great-grandmother Lucinda. In short, if you were darker-skinned than “normal”, it behooved you to claim any other heritage—be it Portuguese, Carthagenian, or Spanish—so your neighbors would not classify you as non-white, i.e., “tainted” with the blood of African-Americans. As Winkler writes about attitudes in the early twentieth-century: “‘mostly white’ was not white enough; ‘mostly white’ or even ‘Indian’ meant ‘colored’ and were the equivalent of ‘black’.”[34] The Melungeons may well have been speaking the truth when they claimed Portuguese ancestry, but that claim was trumped by another small portion of their ethnicity and by the judgment of their neighbors.

In truth, many of the peoples of the South, and of America in general, were a mixed-up jambalaya of ethnicities, but in most cases like the Melungeons, the full story of their histories will probably remain largely a mystery for the immediate future. The best hope for enlightenment comes from genealogy—by painstakingly tracing Melungeon individuals and family groups back in time, as DeMarce recommends and demonstrates, a clearer picture of their origins will emerge—and through expanded and newer DNA testing technology. Until then, for any reader interested in tri-racial groups like the Melungeons, Wayne Winkler’s book is the best place to start examining the social, political, cultural, legal, economic, and genetic aspects of such a heritage.

­­­­________________
Carolyn Earle Billingsley, Ph.D., is a graduate of Rice University. She is the author of Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier (2004); the Coordinator for Course 3 at Samford University’s Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research; and currently works as an independent historian in Saline County, Arkansas.
[1] Sometimes spelled Jaynes or Janes.
[2] Information on the Gantts (originally Gaunt) descendants is condensed from twenty-five years of family history research by the author, including interviews with descendants. In the 1880 census, Lucinda’s paternal birthplace was given as South Carolina; she was twelve years of age, living with her mother and sister in her uncle’s household. But in 1910 and 1920, she reported her father’s place of birth as Mexico, and in 1930, it was reported as Spain. See Saline County, Arkansas, 1880 Census (Benton, Ark.: Saline County History and Heritage Society, 1989), pp.. 70–71; 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Lonoke County, Arkansas, NARA T624_56, p. 118B; 1920 U.S. Federal Census, Pulaski County, Arkansas, NARA T625­_79, ED 147, p. 2B; and 1930 U.S. Federal Census, Pulaski County, Arkansas, NARA T626_90, ED 45, D. 292—the latter three sources accessed via Ancestry.com’s online census image databases, 28 October 2004. Note that Lucinda’s family apparently was not enumerated on the 1900 census.
[3] Shirley Hornbeck, This and That: Genealogy Tips on Black Dutch and Black Irish, Melungeons, Moravians, Pennsylvania Dutch, seen at http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~hornbeck/blkdutch.htm, 15 October 2004. A Google search for “Black Dutch” turned up over 4000 English-language sites.
[4] Autosomal DNA test for L. Jean Neal, mother of author, by Trace Genetics of Davis, California, 2004.
[5] This author recognizes the futility of using the terms “white” and “black” in any concrete way. Race has been proven to be a social construct; in the minds of the dominant culture of the seventeenth- through twentieth-century, you were either white by birth and by appearance, or you were considered black or Indian or some other non-white “race”. For the status of Native Americans, see Wayne Winkler, Walking Toward the Sunset: The Melungeons of Appalachia, N. Brent Kennedy, Series Editor (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2004), p. 79.
[6] Randy Kennedy, “Journals of 2 Ex-Slaves Draw Vivid Portraits,” The New York Times, 14 June 2004, read online at New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/, accessed 21 June 2004
[7] Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), pp. 181–182 (quotation on p. 182).
[8] Bonnie Ball, The Melungeons [Notes on the Origin of a Race] (1969; rev. ed., Johnson City, Tenn.: Overmountain Press, 1992), p. v.
[9] See, for example: William Harlen Gilbert, Jr., “Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger Mixed-Blood Racial Islands of the Eastern United States,” Social Forces, Vol. 24, No. 4 (May, 1946), pp. 443–445; Edward T. Price, “A Geographic Analysis of White-Negro-Indian Racial Mixtures in Eastern United States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 43, No. 2 (June, 1953), pp. 141, and 143; Calvin L. Beale, “An Overview of the Phenomenon of Mixed Racial Isolates in the United States,” American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 74, No. 3 (June 1972): 704–710; Swan M. Burnett, “A Note on the Melungeons,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 2, No. 4 (October 1889): 347–349; and Price, “The Melungeons: A Mixed-Blood Strain of the Southern Appalachians,” Geographical Review, Vol. 41, No. 2 (April, 1951): 256–271—all accessed online at JSTOR; Ball, The Melungeons; and Winkler, Walking Toward the Sunset, p. 2.
[10] Winkler, Walking Toward the Sunset, p. x.
[11] William Harlen Gilbert Jr.,”Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger Mixed-Blood Racial Islands of the Eastern United States,” Social Forces, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Mary 1946): 438–447. For the stories of other tri-racial groups, see Frank W. Porter, III, “Strategies for Survival: The Nanticoke Indians in a Hostile World,” Ethnohistory, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn 1979): 325–345; Thomas J. Harte, “Social Origins of the Brandywine Population,” Phylon, Vol.24, No. 4 (4th Qtr. 1963): 369–378; Harte. “Trends in Mate Selection in a Tri-Racial Isolate,” Social Forces, Vol. 37, No. 3 (March 1959: 215–221; Adolph L. Dial and David K. Eliades, The Only Land I Know: A History of the Lumbee Indians (1975; rpr. ed., Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Lynwood Montell, “The Coe Ridge Colony: A Racial Island Disappears,” American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 74, No. 3 (June 1972): 710–719; Laura L. Lovett, “‘African and Cherokee by Choice’: Race and Resistance under Legalized Segregation,” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1/2 (Winter-Spring 1998): 203–229; S. D. Allen, “More on the Free Black Population of the Southern Appalachian Mountains: Speculations on the North African Connection,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 25, No. 6 (July 1995): 651–671; and Kenneth W. Porter, “Relations Between Negroes and Indians: Contacts as Allies,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July 1932): 307–320. All the articles here can be read online at JSTOR.
[12] Calvin L. Beale, “An Overview of the Phenomenon of Mixed Racial Isolates in the United States,” American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 74, No. 3 (June 1972): 704–710 (quotation on p. 707). Available online at JSTOR. Note that most sources for Melungeon data make reference to Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Lost Colony” of over one hundred settlers, who arrived in Virginia in 1587, but had disappeared by the time ships returned three years later. Many theories speculate the missing settlers were taken in by local Indian tribes, eventually producing mixed offspring and an explanation of the obviously mixed-race people found later in the area.
[13] N. Brent Kennedy, with Robyn Vaughn Kennedy, The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People—An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America (Second, revised, and corrected edition; Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997). A short biographical sketch of Kennedy is available online at The Melungeon Heritage web site, www.melungeon.org/?BISKIT=1796112105&CONTEXT=cat&cat=10040, accessed 26 November 2004: Brent Kennedy is President of the Wellmont Foundation in Kingsport, Tennessee . . . . A native of Wise, Virginia, Kennedy is a graduate of Clinch Valley College (now UVA-Wise). He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Mass Communications Research from the University of Tennessee, where he was a Bickel Fellow, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Melungeon Heritage Association
[14] Mercer University Press: How They Shine: Melungeon Characters in the Fiction of Appalachia, found online at http://www.mupress.org/webpages/books/brake.html, accessed 26 November 2004. The series is called Melungeons: History and Culture Series.
[15] See, for example: Frederic W. Gleach’s review in Ethnohistory, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Autumn, 1998): 804–806); and William L. Anderson’s review in the Journal of Southern History, Vol .62, No. 1 (February 1996): 111–112.
[16] Kennedy, The Melungeons, pp. 164–168 (quotation on p. 166).
[17] Ibid., p. 165.
[18] Ibid., pp. 99–100 (quotations).
[19] Virginia Easley DeMarce, National Genealogical Society Quarterly [hereinafter NGSQ], Vol. 84, No. 2 (June 1996):134–149. The essay can also be found online at the web site of “The Historical Melungeons and Their Kinfolks,” www.geocities.com/ourmelungeons/demarce.html. A biographical snippet accompanying DeMarce’s review essay states that she “is a historian in the Branch of Acknowledgement and Research, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and past president of the National Genealogical Society”; quotation on p. 134. According to Winkler in Walking Toward the Sunset, David Henige’s review of Kennedy’s book [“The Melungeons Become a Race,” Appalachian Journal, Vol. 25.3 (Spring 1998): 270–271)] is “even more scathing that [sic, than] DeMarce’s.”
[20] DeMarce, “’Verry Slitly Mixt’: Tri-Racial Isolate Families of the Upper South—A Genealogical Study,” NGSQ, Vol. 80, No. 1 (March 1992): 5–35; and DeMarce, “Looking at Legends—Lumbee and Melungeon: Applied Genealogy and the Origins of Tri-racial Isolate Settlements,” NGSQ, Vol. 81, No. 1 (March 1993): 24–45.
[21] Winkler, Walking Toward the Sunset, pp. viii (first quotation), and vii (second quotation).
[22] Ibid., Information and first quotation from the back flap of the book jacket, pp. xi (second, third, and fifth quotations); and xii (fourth, sixth, and seventh quotation).
[23] Ibid.,, p. 11 (quotation).
[24] Ibid., p. 26.
[25] Ibid., p. 50.
[26] Ibid., pp. 59 (first quotation), and 75–79 for the “Celebrated Melungeon Case”. In her article, “‘African and Cherokee by Choice’,” Laura L. Lovett uses the phrase “negotiation of their racial identity,” which I have paraphrased here.
[27] Winkler, Walking Toward the Sunset, pp. 100 (first quotation), and 101 (second quotation).
[28] Ibid., p. 107 (quotation). For a discussion of Arthur H. Estabrook and Ivan E. McDougal, Mongrel Virginians (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1926), “a study of the Monacan community of Amherst County, Virginia,” Winkler, Walking Toward the Sunset, pp. 124–130.
[29] Ibid., pp. 148–155 (quotation on p. 151). Worden’s article appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, 18 October 1847.
[30] Winkler, Walking Toward the Sunset, p. 240
[31] Ibid., p. 255.
[32] Ibid., p. 27 (both quotations). The source of the second quotation is cited as Brewton Berry, Almost White (New York: McMillan, 1963), pp. 35–36.
[33] Winkler, Walking Toward the Sunset, p. 79.
[34] Ibid., p. 119.


Red Bone Heritage Foundation
http://www.redboneheritagefoundation.com/

Strat43z's Tri-Racial Genealogy Page
http://members.aol.com/strat43z/melung.html

Melungeon Heritage Association
http://www.melungeon.org/?BISKIT=1796112105&CONTEXT=cat&cat=10040

Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware
By Paul Heinegg
http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/

Mercer University Press
http://www.mupress.org/

Melungeon Research Blog by Nancy Sparks Morrison

Spring Cleaning

She placed his inert body into the box. But he was an awfully tall man, probably wouldn’t fit even into a refrigerator box. OK, a packing crate. One of those old-fashioned ones you only see in the movies, with rough pine slats. Like you’d do up a treasured objet d’art that needed to be transported across the world to a museum. She put him in the crate and surrounded him with those ubiquitous packing peanuts. No, everything would shift too easily; how about encasing him in those molded Styrofoam forms, like they ship DVD players in? They would, of course, have to be specially made to fit his exact dimensions, but she elided over that part. She laid the packet of his love letters right on top in lieu of a rose or some other traditional embellishment.

All packed up. Then she discovered it was a kind of visceral pleasure to nail the crate shut. Yes, much better than enveloping a cardboard box with strapping tape. And, for good measure, she cinched up the box in those strips of some type of dark metal, to hold the whole thing securely. And, finally, she added a sturdy padlock to secure the cargo from accidental opening.

She paused a minute as she heard the whoosh of the door open and the tread of the nurse checking on her. She laid there as naturally as she could, giving the appearance of deep sleep. Which, in actuality would have been difficult to achieve with that light from the hallway penetrating into her room. But satisfied as to her health and safety, the man left and the darkness returned.

Now what? OK—a moving company with about six burly men to cart the whole thing out to their truck. Filling out the shipping forms to . . . where? Ottawa, Canada, sounded pretty good. No—there would probably be trouble trying to get the crate through some kind of customs check. In her research, she’d come across a place called Minnetonka Mills, Minnesota. She had no idea what it was like there, but it sounded far away and like a good place to store something long-term. She visualized herself filling out the paperwork to make it so.

She heard the rattle of the meal carts approaching. Soon someone would come in and force a beginning to her day with a breakfast tray and then meds. She’d have to hurry through the rest of the process.

With the shipping crate out the door and onto the truck, she pictured the end of its journey, stashed in a long-term storage unit up there in cold, cold Minnetonka Mills. She briefly held a mental image of huge snowdrifts piled against the storage unit’s door, making her crate cold, isolated, and secure in the murky depths of an anonymous unit in Minnetonka Mills. Somewhere it could be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.

She held the padlock key in her hand. Standing on a bridge spanning the Mississippi River, she drew her arm back to toss the key into the roiling muddy waters. But at the last minute, she hesitated, and, trying not to think too much, she instead stuck it into the bottom of her jewelry box. You never know.

Copyright 2005 Carolyn Earle Billingsley

Review: The Cultural Analysis of Kinship

Review for the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society . . .

The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David M. Schneider. Edited by Richard Feinberg and Martin Ottenheimer. (Urbana, and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2001. Pp. x, 235. Illustrations, list of contributors, index. $39.95.)


“This collection is a critical appraisal of [David M.] Schneider’s work: his contribution to symbolic anthropology, and to the study of kinship,” Richard Feinberg writes in his introductory essay to this volume (1). But who is Schneider and why does he merit a book of analytic essays by ten prominent anthropologists?

David M. Schneider (1918–1995) published his seminal book American Kinship: A Cultural Account in 1968. This book and his other works reinvigorated the field of anthropological kinship by announcing that there was no such thing as “kinship”—at least not as a set of biological relationships. Rather, he argued, kinship was best understood as a set of semiotically oriented symbols rooted in culture; in other words, kinship is socially constructed by each culture to serve that particular society’s needs and desires. And, thus, he posited, we should abandon the study of kinship because it is culturally relative.

The essays in The Cultural Analysis of Kinship make it quite clear that Schneider was the progenitor of many provocative theories, as well as being an “infuriating” individual, who was sometimes “vindictive, mean-spirited, destructive and self-destructive,” when he wasn’t being “generous, . . . supportive,” and charming (161, and 217, first quotation, and 33, second and third quotation). And despite the many disagreements with Schneider’s ideas, it is evident that he touched off a firestorm of innovation in kinship studies.

In the “Introduction,” Feinberg recapitulates the history of kinship’s key role in anthropological studies and the oft-contested position of cultural relativism in kinship studies. He goes on to summarize Schneider’s life and his controversial contributions to academia, as well as setting the stage for the nine essays that follow, each a discussion and critique of Schneider’s theories. As Feinberg puts it:

[Schneider] helped revolutionize the way in which we think of kinship, family, gender, and culture itself. This book reflects the paradox, ambivalence, and irony experienced by most of those who dealt with David Schneider and whose careers were shaped by his thought. It explores the many paths he charted, posts warning signs at several dead-end intersections, and suggests directions for productive research in the years to come (25).

This book will be of interest mostly to anthropologists and kinship theorists. Despite the interesting title, readers or genealogists looking for a straightforward narrative of family and kinship will probably be disappointed by the highly theoretical discussions. Nevertheless, this is an important and nicely compiled work touching on the most up-to-date aspects of modern anthropological kinship studies.


Carolyn Earle Billingsley is an independent historian, living in Saline County, Arkansas. She is currently revising her dissertation, “Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families on the Cotton Frontier,” for publication by the University of Georgia Press in 2003.