Welcome to the Melungeon Heritage Association Website
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Fourteenth Union: A Melungeon Gathering
June 23 - 26, 2010
in partnership with
Lincoln Memorial University
and
Vardy Community Historical Society
Report on 14th Union by K. Paul Johnson
The 14th Melungeon Union was extended to three days to allow for a full day celebrating the historic Melungeon community of Vardy. The geographical scope of subjects also expanded, ranging from east Texas to northwest Ohio to northeastern North Carolina. While the historic Melungeon heartland of northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia remains home to MHA, we continue to include mixed ancestry peoples all across America in our Unions. 85 conferees attended the Union, coming from Tennessee and Virginia as well as Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas and the District of Columbia.
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Mixing in the Mountains
John Shelton Reed
One January day in 1996, I picked up the Wall Street Journal to find a story headlined "Rural County Balks at Joining Global Village."[2] It told about Hancock County, Tennessee, which straddles the Clinch River in the ridges hard up against the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet. This is a county that has lost a third of its 1950 population, which was only ten thousand to begin with. A third of those left are on welfare, and half of those with jobs have to leave the county to work. The only town is Sneedville, population 1300, which has no movie theater, no hospital, no dry cleaner, no supermarket, and no department store.
I read this story with a good deal of interest, because the nearest city of any consequence is my hometown of Kingsport, 35 miles from Sneedville as the crow flies, but an hour and a half on mountain roads. (If you don't accept my premise that Kingsport is a city of consequence, Knoxville's a little further from Sneedville, in the opposite direction.)
The burden of the article was that many of Hancock County's citizens are indifferent to the state of Tennessee's desire to hook them up to the information superhighway -- a job which will take some doing, especially for the one household in six that doesn't have a telephone. The Journal quoted several Hancock Countians to the effect that they didn't see the point. The reporter observed that the county offers "safe, friendly ways, pristine rivers, unspoiled forests and mountain views," and that many residents simply "like things the way they are."
So far a typical hillbilly-stereotype story. But the sentence that really got my attention was this: "Many families here belong to 100 or so Melungeon clans of Portuguese and American Indian descent, who tend to be suspicious of change and have a history of self-reliance."
Now, I picture the typical Wall Street Journal reader as a harried commuter on the Long Island Railroad, and I wondered what in the world he made of that. What's this "Melungeon" business? And what are Portuguese doing up those remote east Tennessee hollers? You might well ask.
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Plecker's Infamous 1943 List
The head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946, Walter Ashby Plecker, 
believed “there is a danger of the ultimate disappearance of the white race in Virginia, and the country, and the substitution therefore of another brown skin, as has occurred in every other country where the two races have lived together.” This “mongrelization,” in Plecker’s view, caused of the downfall of several earlier civilizations. He was determined to prevent this in America, or at least in Virginia.
In January of 1943, Plecker sent a circular to all public health and county officials in Virginia, listing, county by county, the surnames of all families suspected of having African ancestry. The cover letter stated that they were “mongrels” and were now trying to register as white. The names listed in the southwestern Virginia counties included Collins, Gibson, Moore, Goins, Bunch, Freeman, Bolin, Mullins, as well as other local area surnames. You can read more inside.
Alther's Kinfolks
Best-selling author Lisa Alther chronicles her search for missing branches of her family tree in this dazzling, hilarious memoir. A babysitter told Lisa about the Melungeons: six-fingered child-snatchers who hid in caves. Forgetting about these creepy kidnappers until she had a daughter of her own, Lisa learned they were actually an isolated group of dark-skinned people living in East Tennessee. She set out to discover who these mysterious Melungeons really were—and why her grandmother wouldn’t let her visit their Virginia relatives.Part sidesplitting travelogue, part how (and how not) to climb your family tree, KINFOLKS shimmers with wicked humor, showing just how wacky and wonderful our human family really is.
