The Pee Dee River Melungeons

By Joanne Pezzullo

The Pee Dee families; Bolton, Perkins, Shoemake, etc., are listed on the Core Melungeon DNA project page yet there seems to be mixed signals regarding the "Pee Dee Melungeons" or the "CORE Melungeons" coming from Estes, Crain, Goins and Ferguson in the latest paper published in JoGG. They write in this paper;

"One possible documented source of Portuguese ancestry may be from Juan Pardo’s men who were abandoned at various forts in present day North Carolina, one perhaps as far north and west as Morgantown, North Carolina. [206] Some of Pardo's men may have been Portuguese. These men, if they survived, would have had to have assimilated into the Native population and have taken Native wives, as there were no European women available in 1566. However, the core Melungeon family group is not originally found in western North Carolina, but in eastern Virginia."

It certainly would appear to me they have written the Pee Dee Melungeons out of the Core group as there is no evidence the Bolton, Perkins, Shoemakes etc., had any ties to the Virginia families, they were a separate group found on the Pee Dee River as early as 1725, a stone's throw from the town Ylasi/Ilapi that both deSoto and Pardo had visited, and very possibly descended from Pardos [or deSotos] men.

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