DNA Results Reported

This photo, too, is from Farris Cemetery near Onia in Stone County, Arkansas. Perhaps when St. Patrick ran the snakes out of Ireland, they did not ALL go to Ohio where the famous Serpent Mound and Serpent Relief Sculpture are located.

My research indicates the serpent/egg/water religion can be traced back to the Tower of Babel where Nimrod's mother was its author.

Does your research agree? –Larry
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Larry Stroud
January 17, 2007

Dr. Brent Kennedy, author of The Melungeons, the Resurrection of a Proud People, learned about the Melungeons after he was diagnosed with sarcoidosis in 1994. He wondered what a Southern man was doing developing a disease that has its roots in the Mediterranean area.

Since then, he has determined he is a Melungeon descendant.

See last week's column for more information about the Melungeons, or do your own research on the Internet. A good place to start is www.melungeons.com. A free downloadable book, American Indian Melungeons, is even available at the site.

Melungeons is the name given to a mysterious people first documented in 1654, when English explorers discovered them in the Appalachian wilderness. The people were not American Indians, although some had intermarried with Indians. They were brown-skinned, possibly of Moorish descent, had European features, and often had reddish hair and very distinctive green or blue-green eyes.

They lived in log cabins that had peculiar arched windows, spoke a language that was neither English nor any Indian dialect, and claimed to be, as they pronounced it, Phorty-gee.

Evidence is strong that in 1586 Sir Francis Drake deposited several hundred Turkish and Moorish sailors, liberated from the Spanish, on the coast of North Carolina at Roanoke Island. No trace was found of these people.

Some Melungeons following the early days of their discovery stated they were from a lost colony. That could very well be so, if little Virginia Dare and her people (from the colony of Sir Walter Raleigh) found some of these Turks and Moors who had married American Indian women. Evidence also suggests that some members of the lost Raleigh colony may already have had some Mediterranean ancestry.

It is known, too, that in those early days of American history, a Portuguese fleet wrecked off the coast of North Carolina, and survivors could have made their way inland.

Other possibilities listed in Mysteries of Ancient America (Readers Digest Association, 1986, 320 pages) include: they are descendants of Welsh explorer Prince Madoc, from a band that deserted the forces of Hernando de Soto (he did have Portuguese and people from the Greek Isles in his party), or from the lost tribes of Israel. I will add that they could also be related to Coptic Egyptians and other miners of native copper in Michigan hundreds of years ago, and/or the Norse, who visited the Northeast much more often and stayed much longer than mainstream scholars would have anyone believe.

The whole New England area was called Northumbra, meaning Northmans Land, when the (quote) first (unquote colonists arrived.

DNA tests on known Melungeon descendants, so far, have not completely solved the puzzle but show links with several peoples including some of those previously mentioned, as well as Sephardic Jews.

Sephardic Jews are members of the branch of European Jews who settled mainly in Spain, Portugal and northern Africa, although many of those had migrated to England, Ireland and Scotland and embraced the Christian faith before the English (or whatever passed for English) began colonizing what is known today as the United States.

DNA results reported in 2002 from known Melungeon descendants showed them to have 83 percent European genetic material, representing Europeans from north to south; 7 percent matching populations in Turkey, Syria and northern India; 5 percent American Indian; and 5 percent African.

In other words, the surviving genes from Middle Eastern and East Indian ancestors are in equal proportion to those of Native Americans and Africans. The original, seventeenth-century percentages of all three groups (African, Native American, and Middle Eastern/East Indian) were undoubtedly much higher in the past than what we are seeing today because those genetic traces have been diluted with continued intermarriage with surrounding populations.

But enough of them are there to still be traceable among the Melungeon descendants of today. The Mediterranean and Middle Eastern heritages are definitely there.

Further piquing my interest in Melungeons is that many other so-called tri-racial isolate populations exist in the eastern U.S. I am not making up any of these names: the Lumbee of North Carolina, Person County Indians also known as Cubans and Portuguese, of North Carolina, Goinstown Indians in North Carolina, Goins in eastern Tennessee, Monacan Indians also known as Issues, in Virginia; Magoffin County People of Kentucky; Carmel Indians of Ohio; Brown People of Kentucky; Guineas of West Virginia; Chestnut Ridge People of West Virginia; We-Sorts of Maryland; Nanticoke-Moors of Delaware; Turks and Brass Ankles of South Carolina; Redbones of South Carolina (not the same as Gulf States Redbones); Dead Lake People of Florida; Dominickers of Florida; and Ramapough Mountain Indians (Jackson Whites) of New York and New Jersey.

Illnesses or diseases to which Melungeon descendants have a tendency to contract include sarcoidosis, Bechets Syndrome, Josephs Disease, Mediterranean Familial Fever, thallasemia and related disorders.

To read more about these illnesses, visit the melungeon.com Web pages.

Some Web sites contain surnames of families whose members are likely to be descended from Melungeons.
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