Melungeons, Genealogy, and The HistoryMakers

So, for this week, we’ve been given more leeway to write about topics of our own choosing. So, I’m going to write a bit about family history and what the archive can tell us about genealogy.

I’m super into genealogy. I’ve spent untold hours building my family tree on Ancestry.com, and I’ve even done the DNA testing from 23andMe to learn more about my background.

Stay tuned at the end of this post for an update on my work as a Student Brand Ambassador at Northeastern University.

Lately, I’ve become interested in a branch of my family tree that has Melungeon heritage. Melungeon people, if you don’t know, are members of a “tri-racial isolate” that historically lived in the Appalachian counties of Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. They used to cause quite a stir among their Anglo-American neighbors, who couldn’t tell whether they were white, black, or indigenous American. Because of their racial ambiguity, lot of mythology sprung up about the Melungeon people and their origins. Some thought they were the lost tribe of Israel, descendants of marooned Portuguese sailors, or even aliens from outer space.

But, DNA testing has revealed that the story is actually a lot simpler: To make a long story short, Melungeons were proven to, mostly, be descended from interracial (mostly Black and white) couples who had children in colonial Virginia, before both the inherited status of enslavement as well as anti-miscegenation became super entrenched. As things became tougher for people of African descent in the colony, the Melungeon families moved west into the Appalachian mountains, which was at the time less densely populated by white Anglo settlers. In time, people forgot where the Melungeons came from, and the Melungeons themselves were more than happy to promote stories that didn’t tie them so directly to blackness. (For obvious reasons.)

In my genealogical research, I’ve discovered my familial connections to the Melungeons thanks to public records. I’ve been able to trace my mothe'r’s line of Melungeon ancestors, the Goins family, way back to the Tidewater area of Virginia. They moved into the mountainous region of southwest Virginia shortly after the Revolutionary War.

"A typical malungeon" was published in 1890 by Will Allen Dromgoole, it found in Nashville Sunday American, August 31, 1890. (Wikimedia Commons)

My grandmother and her sisters, who were all of Melungeon descent through the Goins family line.

Because I’m aware of how extensive the Digital Archive is, I decided to look up “Melungeon” and see what I could find. Sure enough, I found a total of five clips with the word. In one of them, Dr. Warren Goins talks about his paternal ancestry and tells the interviewer about how he found out that he has Melungeon heritage.

Warren Goins mentioned that his father, also a Goins, was from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Genealogist that I am, I decided to look up Jepther Goins, Warren’s father, on Ancestry.com to see if he and I were related. I found the family in the 1920 census living in Winston-Salem. The census notes that Jepther’s father, Major Goins (who would be Warren’s grandfather) was born in Virginia. Virginia, of course, is where the Melungeon Goins family originates. But, I couldn’t find a trace of Major Goins’s own parents or where he had grown up. So, it’s very possible due to our shared surname that I might be distantly related to Warren Goins, but with the records I found I can’t be sure. If I had more time and better access to records about Major Goins’s background, it would be easier to prove.

After that little foray into Goins family history, I wanted to see what else the Digital Archive had to say about genealogy. Of special interest to me was the interview with Anthony "Tony" Preston Burroughs, a noted genealogist who was president of the Afro American Genealogical and Historical Society of Chicago, Inc. He had some very interesting things to say about African-American genealogical research and what he was able to learn about his own family background.

I’ve been researching my tree for nearly ten years, but I haven’t heard much about the field of genealogy from professionals in the field. So, it was really interesting to hear what Burroughs had to say about certain questions I’ve had myself—like how African-American families, almost without fail, have some shoddy old stories that were passed down about being Cherokee or Blackfoot Native Americans. I’ve heard stories like this from my own family!

Burroughs offered an interesting theory about why African Americans might’ve wanted to claim indigenous ancestry after the Civil War. Basically, he thought it was a way for recently freed people of lighter complexions to distance themselves from blackness, which made everyday life more difficult during Jim Crow:

In terms of the Indian thing, which I've thought about a lot, my theory on it is, is that in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, when segregation was legal from Plessy versus Ferguson, 18--what--'96 [Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896], because the Ku Klux Klan [KKK] was very prevalent, because lynching was the law of the land, and that black folks could be lynched at the drop of a hat because blacks could not work in Corporate America. Black people, or shall I say (air quotes) colored people and Negroes and niggers were on the low rung of the totem pole. And there was no black pride movement. I mean, there were, there were a few blacks when you look at like Carter Woodson [Carter G. Woodson] and W.E. Du Bois [W.E.B. Du Bois] and, and, and Booker T. [Booker T. Washington] and a few people that were into doing some kind of research on who back people were, but on the, on the majority part, people did not wanna be colored. They did not wanna associate with black people at all. Those people that were very light skinned passed for white. Those that weren't, they wanted to do everything they could to show that they weren't black because black was a bad word, you know.

I hadn’t heard this theory before, but it actually makes a lot of sense. I kind of want to show Burroughs’s interview to some of my family members who don’t believe me when I say we don’t have any recent indigenous ancestry!

Anyway, this was a fun “rabbit-hole” to go down while researching, and I’m glad that The HistoryMakers recognizes that genealogists are important.

SBA Update

In terms of my work as a Student Brand Ambassador, this past week has actually been an incredibly productive one for me. On Tuesday, I had a meeting with Amy Lewontin, the collections librarian at Northeastern University’s library. She was super helpful, and now I will be working closely with the library in order to make sure more students are aware of the HistoryMakers Digital Archive as a resource. I’ve got a few tasks ahead of me in terms of working with the library, including creating a LibGuide and writing a post for the library’s blog. Hopefully, I’ll have a lot of that down just before or shortly after Thanksgiving.

On Thursday, I also met with Dr. Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, who is the Director of Africana Studies at my university. We discussed me giving my HistoryMakers pitch to Africana Studies classes early next semester ahead of the contest I’m putting on in February. I’m going to do my darnedest to make sure that happens and goes smoothly next semester.

Well, that’s about all I have right now! I’ll update you all with more later.