The Melungeons are a tri-racial group, descended from Europeans, Africans, and Indians. Although the term Melungeon refers to a specific group, it has become a generic label for many similar groups: the Carmel Indians of southern Ohio, the Brown People of Kentucky, the Guineas of West Virginia, the We-Sorts of Maryland, the Nanticoke-Moors of Delaware, the Cubans and Portuguese of North Carolina, the Brass Ankles of South Carolina, and the Creoles and Redbones of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
The earliest dictionary definition says a Melungeon is “One of a very dark people living in the Mountains of Tennessee” (Funk & Wagnells, 1893). A slightly later definition called them “a dark people of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina with a discernible mix of ‘white, Indian and black blood'” (Century Dictionary and Encyclopedia, 1906). The name probably derives from the French word mélange, a mixture.
The Melungeons lived originally in Appalachia, primarily in the Cumberland Plateau of Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Roberta Estes says, “The Melungeons were a group of individuals found primarily in Hawkins and Hancock Counties of Tennessee and in the far southern portion of Lee County, Virginia which borders Hawkins and Hancock counties in Tennessee. At one time isolated geographically on and near Newman’s Ridge and socially due to their dark countenance, they were known to their neighbors as Melungeons, a term applied as an epithet or in a pejorative manner.” (Estes, 2012)
The ethnic mixing that resulted in the Melungeons began in 17th century Virginia at a time when African servants were not yet considered to be chattel slaves, but were indentured servants who were freed when the period of indenture expired. Typically, the European ancestors of the Melungeons were marginalized colonists in Virginia, whose ancestors came from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany. The African ancestors of the Melungeons were Bantu Africans — the Kimbundu-speaking people from Angola and Kikongo-speaking people from the historic Kongo region along Africa’s lower west coast.
This mixed group began to form separate communities when the first anti-African laws began to restrict their freedoms about 1660. Their descendants were pushed to the margins of society and many of them eventually gravitated to the mountains of southern Appalachia where they mixed with Indians, chiefly the Cherokee and Choctaw.
Because of racism in the American South, the Melungeons historically denied their mixed ancestry and attempted to explain their color by various stories. Some claimed to be descendants of Turks and Moors liberated from the Spanish by Sir Walter Drake and dumped at Roanoke Island, North Carolina in 1586. Some said they were descended from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked or abandoned by the Spanish before the English arrived in Virginia and discovered in the Appalachian Mountains by the English in 1654. Some looked to Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony or to the DeSoto Expedition. Others looked further back and claimed to be descendants of settlers from ancient Carthage, of the Lost Tribes of Israel, of Old World Gypsies, or of the mythical Welsh Indians.
A DNA study by Roberta Estes, et al. in 2013 showed “the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin” (Estes, 2012; Loller, 2021). FamilySearch criticizes the study on various grounds.
In 2013 I warned, “A lot of nonsense has been written about the Melungeons, with infighting among groups who advocate competing theories. Sources must be used with extreme caution.” That’s just as true today.
In Ireland, it was believed that swans pulled the bark of the sun across the underworld sea each night. Swans also bore the souls of Celtic chieftains to the afterlife. Swans had magic powers that could make mortals sleep. Swan skins and feathers were used to make the cloaks of Celtic poets. In County Mayo, the souls of virtuous maidens were said to reside in swans. In Scotland, three swans flying together was an omen of national disaster. Celtic swan deities were generally solar and possessed the healing powers of sun and water.
Conductor of Souls
For the ancient Celts swans were the conductors of souls across the Milky Way at birth and again at death. It was a swan, not a stork, who brought babies. In the Hebrides people saw the whooper swans migrating northwards to their breeding grounds in Iceland each spring as carrying the souls of the dead to heaven.
Brigid
Brigid (Irish Brighid, Scottish Bride, Manx Bree) was a pre-Christian Celtic goddess associated with poetry, fertility, childbirth, healing, smithing, medicine, arts and crafts, cattle, sacred wells, serpents (in Scotland), and the arrival of spring. She seems to have been a dawn goddess, accounting for many of her associations. Cormac’s Glossary, written in the 10th century by Christian monks, says she was “the goddess whom poets adored”.
She appears in Irish mythology as a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the daughter of the Dagda and wife of Bres, with whom she had a son named Ruadán. For the Britons she was Brigantia, patron goddess of the Brigantes who gave their name to Britain. She was assimilated to the Roman pantheon as Minerva, goddess of wisdom.
According to Robert Graves, one of Brigid’s symbols was the white swan.
Black the town yonder, Black those that are in it, I am the White Swan, Queen of them all.
After the conversion to Christianity she became St. Brigid, called Jesus’ nursemaid. She shares many of the goddess’ attributes and associations. They share a feast day (February 1, Imbolc) that marks the beginning of spring. In the Christian era, 19 nuns at Kildare tended a perpetual flame for the Saint, which was probably a continuation of a pre-Christian practice of women tending a flame in the goddess’ honor.
The Birth of Cúchulainn
Conchobor, the King of Ulster, and his nobles were at Emhain Macha when a flock of swans descended on the plain, eating all of the grass. There were nine score swans, each score flying as a group and divided into couples tied together with a silver chain. The Ulster folk were angry that the swans had eaten everything, so they chased the swans using their chariots. The chase reached Brug on the Boann River, now Newgrange. Night was falling and it was snowing heavily so the the people sought shelter inside Newgrange. Conchobor’s sister Dechtine was visited in her sleep by Lugh, the Celtic god of light. From their union, she conceived Sétanta, who in later life became the great Irish hero Cúchulainn.
The Story of Angus
Angus, a son of the Dagda, fell in love with the swan maiden Caer, who appeared to him in a dream. At the Festival of Samhain, he visited Loch Bel Dracon and saw a flock of swans, each linked with a silver chain. Caer was among them, wearing a golden chain and coronet. Angus called to her, and so became a swan himself. Angus and Caer circled the lake three times, singing a magical song that put everyone in the vicinity to sleep for three days and nights.
The Children of Lir
The four children of Lir — Fionnúala and her brothers Àed, Conn and Fiachra — were changed into swans by their evil stepmother Aoife, who condemned them to spend 900 years in the form of swans, 300 years at each of three places in Ireland. They could only become human when a prince from the north married a princess from the south and a church bell was rung in Ireland (signaling the coming of Christianity). To protect the children, when the Milesian chieftains came to Ireland, they are said to have made it illegal to harm a swan. At last the conditions were fulfilled and Saint Patrick’s bell was rung. The children were restored, but they were 900 years old and immediately died of old age.
Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water; Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose, While, murmuring mournfully, Lir’s lovely daughter Tells to the night-star the tale of her woes. When shall the swan, her death-note singing, Sleep with wings in darkness furl’d? When will heaven, its sweet bells ringing, Call my spirit from this stormy world? “Sadly, O Moyle, to thy winter-wave weeping, Fate bids me languish long ages away; Yet still in her darkness doth Erin lie sleeping, Still doth the pure light its dawning delay. When will that day-star, mildly springing, Warm our isle with peace and love? Call my spirit to the fields above? — Tom Moore
In another version of the story there is no term fixed for the breaking of the enchantment, but when the bells of Innis-gloria rang for the mass, four white birds rose from the loch and flew to church, where they occupied daily a bench, sitting side by side and exhibiting the utmost reverence and devotion. Charmed at the piety of the birds, St. Brandan prayed for them, when they were transformed into children, were baptized, and then died. [Sabine Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages(1866-1868).]
The Seven Swan Brothers
A king had seven sons and a daughter, all of whom he pampered. His wife was no longer living, so the king remarried. The new queen couldn’t stand her step-children, so she started telling the king how ill-mannered his children were until the king no longer cared for them.
When she was sure her husband wouldn’t inquire too closely, the queen changed her step-sons into seven swans. She told the king that they had refused to come home and had been lost in the woods. The king wasn’t sorry to lose his disobedient sons, but their sister Lisette knew what her step-mother had done. Lisette begged the king to be allowed to look for her brothers, and after a year of Lisette’s tears, the king relented. He allowed her one week to search the wood for her brothers.
Trudging through the woods, Lisette became exhausted. She lay down for a nap, but her sleep was interrupted by the sound of wings. She woke up and saw seven swans with gold crowns. Just as the sun set over the ocean, the seven swans lost their feathers and became Lisette’s brothers. They told her that they lived in a land across the sea, so far away that they could only cross the sea on the longest day of the year. During the day they lived as swans, but at night they regained their human form.
The seven brothers decided to take Lisette back with them across the sea. To carry her, they wove a basket of willows. As they passed over the castle of the Fairy Queen Morgana, that queen visited Lisette in a dream. The queen told Lisette that the only way to release her brothers from their spell was to make them each a shirt woven from yarn made from the kind of stinging nettles that are found only in churchyards. Further, the queen told Lisette that she must not utter a word the whole time, or the spell would fail.
As the children arrived in distant country, the sun was setting. As the brothers turned back into human form, Lisette told them about her dream. Then, she began working on the shirts.
One day the king of that country was out hunting. He came across Lisette at her work and fell in love with her. When Lisette did not object, the king carried her back to his castle and married her. However, the king’s chancellor was jealous of Lisette. He spied on her, saw her gathering nettles in the churchyard at night, and accused her of sorcery. Lisette couldn’t speak in her own defense, and she was condemned to be burned at the stake. As she walked to her execution, she carried the shirts she had made with her. As the executioner led LIsette to the pyre, her swan brothers came flying to her rescue. Lisette threw the shirts over them and they became human once more, all except the youngest brother, who had a swan’s wing in place of one of his arms because Lisette had not had time to finish his shirt.
The spell broken, Lisette was free from her vow of silence. She told her husband the story and he was proud to have such a resourceful and determined wife, as well as seven strong and handsome brothers in law.
The story is similar to the German fairy tale The Six Swans, and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans (1838), in which brothers are turned into swans by an evil stepmother. In the Aarne-Thompson classification system for folktales, there are dozens of European stories in which a woman saves or is saved by her brothers, who have been turned into various types of birds (type 451).
The Whooper
The Whooper, a swan, was the tutelary spirit of Sennen Bay in Cornwall. Even when the weather was clear, a small blanket of mist would form in the bay, and the the Whooper would cry out. The cry foretold storms and prevented fishermen going into the open sea when storms threatened. The Whooper disappeared when two men, who were determined to go fishing, ignored its warning, and beat their way through the misty cloud with a flail. Neither they nor the spirit were ever seen again.
It might seem very archaic but it turns out you really can be stripped of your coat of arms. That is, if you used fraud to obtain it.
News Clipping: Heraldic arms lost in dispute
What seems to have happened is this. David Holliday, a Dallas attorney, wanted to be chief of the Halliday family. In Scotland, a chief of the name or clan gets to use the original coat of arms without differences to show a junior line. Holliday was granted the undifferenced arms of the last chief, John Halliday of Castlemains. He would have had to prove his descent, of course.
But that was a mistake. Maybe a simple genealogical mistake, but complicated by the fact he claimed to reside at Corehead Tower. It seems he didn’t, not really. Mailed addressed to him there was returned as “address unknown”.
The grant of arms to him was revoked.
Over the years I’ve known more than my share of aspiring clan chiefs, most with audacious schemes to prove up their claims. This seems on order with those.
I understand the glamour of it, although in my own opinion the clan system seems likely to have been oppressive for the common folk. Which doesn’t stop me from wearing my kilt now and then.
They found a new branch of the y chromosome that’s older than anything found so far. The human
“The new divergent lineage, which was found in an individual who submitted his DNA to Family Tree DNA, a company specializing in DNA analysis to trace family roots, branched from the Y chromosome tree before the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in the fossil record.”
There is a limit to how many times this can happen but for the present it won’t be a surprise when there are new leaps of age and diversity. The whole science is still so new, there hasn’t been time for all the data to shake out.
“Pierre d’Hozier was a seventeenth century French genealogist and juge d’armes to the king. His job was to check on claims of nobility. His son, Charles, eventually took over the work and the position of juge d’armes. He created, at the request of Louis XIV, the Armorial général de France, a list of all the coats of arms in use at the time. It includes not only personal arms, but those of cities, towns and associations. The king wanted to know not only that those who surrounded him were of the right sort, but the names of all of those who could be taxed as nobility.
“All of the d’Hoziers’ genealogy notes, and those of other royal genealogists, especially Bernard Chérin, (but also including the work of the fraud, Jean de Launay, who was put to death for selling fake arms and fake “proofs” of nobility) are in the Bibliothèque nationale. The entire collection is entitled the Cabinet des Titres.”
Continue reading: Anne Morddel, “The Cabinet des Titres” in The French Genealogy Blog (Jan. 25, 2013).
