Book Review: Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America

(Mercer University Press, 2005)
Elizabeth Hirschman PhD.
Rutgers University

Review by MHS board member Janet Crain
Republished from the MHS Newsletter, Winter 2009

Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America was the culmination of a twenty year quest by the author to discover her true family heritage. Growing up, she had a small gray booklet, written by a relative in the 1880s and periodically updated, about the descendants of Samuel Chase of Maryland, a signer of the Constitution and a Supreme Court justice that traced the Chase family bloodline. Her name was in it. Her rejected application to join the DAR led to the shocking realization that the book was incorrect.

After she learned this was not true she set out to discover who she really was .The chance discovery of a book, Melungeons; the Resurrection of a Proud People by Brent Kennedy at the Atlanta airport in 1999 led to her subsequent belief that she was a Melungeon descendant and even more startling, that the Melungeons were Semitic (Muslin and Jews). Once Ms. Hirschman made this determination, nothing she discovered in her future research dissuaded her from this belief. Beliefs can be a dangerous trap for a researcher, as can emotion. It is very hard to research ones own genealogy and stay objective.

There are most likely many fancifully constructed genealogies that combine truth and supposition and wild ideas and when kept within the immediate family do minimal damage. However Ms. Hirschman used her influential professional background and Brent Kennedy's recommendation to publish this theory as the book under discussion.

The author personally financed many DNA tests from surnames she had decided were Melungeon. Fully expecting a slew of J1 and J2 Y chromosome haplogroups to come pouring in as the results, she was momentarily baffled by the R1b haplogroups most of her hand picked participants were shown to have. (http://www.melungeons.com/articles/melungeondnaproject.htm) But then she was struck by the realization that - aha - Scotland was once Jewish. This happy coincidence gave her a title for another book; When Scotland Was Jewish. (http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~valorie/review-when_scotland_was_jewish.htm)

Saving this book for another time, I would like to point out that however sincere Ms. Hirschman's motives are, her complete lack of scholarship concerning research into the Quakers, Huguenots, Primitive Baptists, Masons, Presbyterians and other organizations she contends were "covers" for Jewish activities have done a great disservice to the history of Appalachia in particular and America in general.

The practices she calls Jewish are not. She cites such death customs as covering or turning mirrors to the wall, burying that day or the next, using candles and flowers near the corpse, placing salt and earth on the deceased's abdomen, burying in small family plots, etc. as Jewish when in actuality they were a mixture of superstition and practicality in an age of no embalming and limited transportation.

Likewise, couples marrying in the home was very widespread all over the South, extending into Texas. And young people married cousins, not because they were Jewish, but because they had access to a very limited social circle.

Of course there were a few Jewish families and they likely blended into the rich tapestry of heritages. There could have been a few Turkish indentured servants or other ethnicities also, but they were not the rule; they were the exception.

There is no evidence, DNA or otherwise, that Abraham Lincoln or Daniel Boone were Melungeon, Muslim or Jewish. This and many other unsubstantiated statements make this book a very weak offering for those pursuing an earnest study of these subjects.

The old axiom; Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence, holds true. And this book cannot provide the evidence. I have to conclude that Ms. Hirschman became convinced that she descends from this small mysterious fabled group, the Melungeons, just as they were projected upon the national conscience through books and the Internet. She has attempted to remove any inconveniences that threaten her theories by the expediency of rewriting history if necessary. This is not a book to be taken seriously.