In Search of the Mozingo Family - Part 1 of 3

In search of the meaning of 'Mozingo'

Curious about his unusual name, a journalist and father traces his lineage to the 1600s — and unearths a conflicted past.

By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times
Part one of three
May 16, 2010

My father's family landed in 1942 Los Angeles as if by immaculate conception, unburdened by any past.

Growing up, I knew all about how my mother's grandparents came to California from southern France and Sweden. But my dad's side was a mystery.

All I heard were a few stories about my grandfather as a youth in Hannibal, Mo., how he found a tarantula in a shipment of bananas at his dad's corner store, how he and a friend once rode motorcycles out west. But no one talked about Mozingos further back, or where they came from.

I might never have given the subject any thought except for a strange word: our name. All my life, people had asked me about it.

I began to look into it, and the more I learned, the more I realized our history had been buried. My curiosity turned to compulsion. I had to unearth the truth about our origins and the forces that had obscured them for centuries. I wanted to know my forebears and feel myself among them, to see if their forgotten personalities and struggles and secrets somehow still lived within us.

I set out last year to learn our story, traveling from the Tidewater of Virginia to the hollows of Kentucky and southeastern Indiana and beyond. At times, I struggled to absorb what I was finding, and I met Mozingos who were skeptical of it, or ambivalent, or fiercely resistant.

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Note: This three-part series recounts a fascinating genealogical odyssey. Some authors have linked the name Mozingo to the Melungeons. There is no basis for this in fact, so far as I can determine; however, the parallels with Melungeon origins -- the difficulty of the search for them, the abundance of fanciful origin myths tenaciously clung to by many, and the resistance to the truth -- abound.