Museum of Appalachia

The Museum of Appalachia, located in Clinton, Tennessee, is a living history museum of pioneer, frontier, and early artifacts of mountain life in the Southern Appalachians.

To visit the museum online: Click Here.

To see a number of pictures taken at the museum: Click Here.

East Tennessee Guide

A vacation guide to East Tennessee, including a History and Heritage section, and Music and Arts section, and a listing of local festivals. The parent page has guides to Middle and West Tennessee as well, but why would go looking there for Melungeon heritage?

To visit the East Tennessee guide: Click Here.

Note: For some inexplicable reason the Sneedville Fall Festival is missing from the festival listing. This should be made the subject of a politely incensed letter to site's webmaster via the feedback link near the bottom of the page.

Scott County Genealogy

Scott County, Virginia is another fine GenWeb site, and one which is very important to Melungeon genealogy.

To visit Scott County: Click Here.

To locate GenWeb sites for other counties of interest: Click Here.

Melungeons in the New York Times

By MHS President Wayne Winkler

Calvin Beale died on September 2, 2008, at the age of 85. A demographer with the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Beale was best known for his discovery that decades of rural-to-urban migration patterns were being reversed in the 1960s. However, for many of us, his most significant work was with the Melungeons and other mixed-race groups. As his obituary in the New York Times said, “He wrote, for example, of a mixed-race people called Melungeons, reputedly of white, black and Indian descent. They are found from the Tidewater areas to the Piedmont and the Allegheny-Cumberland Plateaus. ‘Some are landless, some landed,’ he wrote. ‘But they are all marginal men — wary until recently of being black, aspiring where possible to be white and subject to rejection and scorn on either hand.’”

To continue reading: Click Here.

Melungeon DNA Project

Jack Goins, Principal Administrator
Roberta Estes, Technical Adviser

Project Goals:

To establish modal DNA results for the Core Melungeon lines of Goins, Gibson, Minor, Bunch, Bolin, Bolling, Collins, Williams, Goodman, Denham, Bolin, Mullins, Moore, Shumake, Boltons, Perkins, Mornings, Menleys, Breedlove, Hopkins and Mallett, including variant spellings, and other families with these names in their lines.

To learn more and see current results: Click Here and Click Here.

What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America

Harvard University Pres, 2008

By Ariela J. Gross
John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California

Is race something we know when we see it? In 1857, Alexina Morrison, a slave in Louisiana, ran away from her master and surrendered herself to the parish jail for protection. Blue-eyed and blond, Morrison successfully convinced white society that she was one of them. When she sued for her freedom, witnesses assured the jury that she was white, and that they would have known if she had a drop of African blood. Morrison’s court trial—and many others over the last 150 years—involved high stakes: freedom, property, and civil rights. And they all turned on the question of racial identity.

Over the past two centuries, individuals and groups (among them Mexican Americans, Indians, Asian immigrants, and Melungeons) have fought to establish their whiteness in order to lay claim to full citizenship in local courtrooms, administrative and legislative hearings, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Like Morrison’s case, these trials have often turned less on legal definitions of race as percentages of blood or ancestry than on the way people presented themselves to society and demonstrated their moral and civic character.

Unearthing the legal history of racial identity, Ariela Gross’s book examines the paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived capacity for citizenship in American society. This book reminds us that the imaginary connection between racial identity and fitness for citizenship remains potent today and continues to impede racial justice and equality.

For more information: Click Here.

Note: Melungeons are specifically discussed in Chapter Four: Citizenship of the "Little Races".

It is encouraging to see a professional historian discussing Melungeons in a scholarly work published by a major university press.

Genetic Genealogy on the Web

As a follow-up to Roberta Estes' terrific article of this past Wednesday, "DNA Testing and the Melungeons," I would like to highlight the two genetic genealogy web sites listed on the MHS Blog's "Links of Interest" page, the portal to which can be found on the sidebar to the right:

International Society of Genetic Genealogy

The mission of the International Society of Genetic Genealogy is to advocate for and educate about the use of genetics as a tool for genealogical research, and promote a supportive network for genetic genealogists.

To visit: Click Here.

The Genetic Genealogist

The Genetic Genealogist examines the intersection of traditional genealogical techniques and modern genetic research. The blog also explores the latest news and developments in the related field of personal genomics.

To visit: Click Here.