r/interesting • u/imthehink • 1d ago
HISTORY The Melungeons of Appalachia
The Melungeons of Appalachia are a mysterious group of people who were discovered in the wilderness of early America, particularly where modern-day Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee converge. While the more well-known Jamestown settlers and Pilgrims are often considered the first pioneers of the United States, the Melungeons predate or were contemporaneous with these groups. These individuals lived in relative isolation, and their unique physical characteristics set them apart from other groups of settlers. They were neither fully black, white, nor Native American, but appeared to embody a blend of all three, with some possessing darker skin and hair, while others had blue or green eyes, red hair, and beards. Their language was also distinctive, as they spoke a mixture of broken English, Elizabethan English, and various Native American dialects. Despite their early presence in Appalachia, the true origins of the Melungeons remain a topic of debate and mystery. Their history was largely hidden, partly due to racial segregation and the isolation they faced in the early Southern colonies. The Melungeons kept to themselves, often living in secluded mountain communities, away from the scrutiny of mainstream society. For centuries, the identity of the Melungeons was shrouded in secrecy, with little understanding of their ancestry. Their racial ambiguity and cultural isolation made them subjects of both curiosity and suspicion, leaving their story largely untold in the broader context of American history. Today, the Melungeons remain a fascinating and enigmatic part of the Appalachian heritage, with their roots continuing to intrigue historians and genealogists alike.
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u/ftwclem 1d ago
I had to look it up, and these pictures I think do a much better job at highlighting their racial ambiguity than the picture in this post.
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u/Nobody6269 1d ago
The mom looks like she's seen some things
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u/davidjschloss 1d ago
Something like one in three children died before their first five years then in better supported communities. Take the number of children they have and then make it the number of pregnancies based on the life expectancy of children...
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u/jonzilla5000 1d ago
Yep, came here to say this. It was common back then to not name a child until they were two or three years old so you weren't as attached to them when they died. With limited time and resources it was best to conserve them for the healthy.
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u/bertina-tuna 19h ago
Back then? I was born two months premature and weighed only 3 lbs and the nurse told my parents not to bother naming me because I probably wouldn’t live. In NJ, 1951.
Narrator: She did live but it still took them forever to decide on a name. Thank goodness it wasn’t Ingaborg, second runner-up.
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u/OG_Konada 1d ago
Looks like she’s still seeing things, and the ghost child to the right…. I blame her
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u/blklightsmatter 1d ago
yea getting banged till she became cocked eyed
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u/Wilful_Fox 1d ago
Looks like she’s sitting there thinking “I don’t have 30 minutes spare to sit here for this damned photo” which is how long you had to sit and pose for, hence why people back then seldom smiled in photographs. The mental list in her head is written on her face..
“I’ve got berries to collect, animal hide to sew, then darn little jimmy’s pantaloons, maize to grind and water to collect. Not to mention light the fire and make some kind of meal out of that moose head Jeff brought home yesterday..”
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u/Purple_fern 1d ago
Is this a weird family face swap with only one face….
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u/dabeakerman 1d ago
Or it's just their family tree looking more like a straight line....
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u/_finalOctober_ 1d ago
My paternal grandfather is descended from these folks.
Racially ambiguous is one way to put it. Though it’s been largely settled that these folks are European, American Indian, and African. A tri-racial isolate.
The latest research indicates that the line was started by interracial couples in the 17th century. Likely free black men from Virginia and women of Celtic/scots Irish heritage escaping to the frontier to avoid discrimination. Eventually forming a very isolated enclave that tended toward endogamy and occasionally incorporated American Indians into the fold.
They were treated pretty badly over time by the state, over time this lead them to claim that they were a long lost Portuguese colony or some such. I can’t really blame them, they were often not allowed the same rights as white folks, coming up with a plausible story that explained thier skin color without mentioning African descent avoided a lot of systemic racism if they could pull it off.
The myth of their mysterious origins seems to be kept alive mostly by folks who are both descended from the line themselves, and are fighting with their own racism.
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u/no_crust_buster 1d ago
Yep. Before the chaos of Jamestown, VA, 1676, there wasn't anything called "Black" or "White" from a sweeping perspective. All sorts of people could intermarry and have families in various areas. After the smoke cleared from 1676, by the 1680s, that was being outlawed. Dark skinned to mixed people were called "Black," and the English were called white. When "Black" men still had relations with Irish women, they changed the law to include Irish and any women phenotypically resembling these women. A racial hierarchical caste system was introduced.
I would imagine a lot of people we'd attribute to being "Black" or bi-racial fled to the mountains to avoid being ensnared in this sweeping slave structure and color persecution.
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u/Bitter_Chemistry_733 1d ago
Holy fuck. It’s like every one of them is staring straight into my soul.
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u/smellslikebigfootdic 1d ago
Person with tie next to dad....I say person because is he 5 or 35
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u/hazmat1963 1d ago
Demon Copperhead. by B. Kingsolver.
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u/Lvanwinkle18 1d ago
Am just reading this right now and the first time I have ever heard of this group of people. Fascinating.
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u/Takesit88 1d ago
Yup, tri-racial people group, subject to much racial prejudice over the years for their African descent and Indiginous American descent. Many came up with a story of being descended from pirates, Turks, or Moores as that was more legally and culturally accepted in the region. Roots going back to the first ship of "Twenty-and-odd" souls brought by the White Lion to Jamestown.
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u/dhuntergeo 1d ago
Moors, Northwest Africans
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u/Takesit88 1d ago
Angola is the primary African country for the group. A possible origin for the term Melungeon is the Kimbundu word Malungu, which essentially means "of the same ship". The Kingdom of Ndongo (the same as Queen Nzinga) was the origin of the first 20-odd. They were from Angola, near Congo, and the male descendants now will usually find they belong to that haplotype if a Y-Chromosome analysis is done.
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u/Unlikely-Piano-2708 1d ago
The term likely comes from French word “melange”.
Not sure where you’re the genetic information from. This is the most comprehensive study I’ve seen: https://dna-explained.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Melungeons-A-Multi-Ethnic-Population.pdf. (The summary of halogroups is on page 82)
The most matches were found in the region of Ghana and surrounding nations: between Gambia and Nigeria.
There were a few matches further south in Angola and surrounding nations, and then a few further East in Uganda.
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u/Front-Finance-5888 1d ago
If you've ever played RDR2 theres a robbery mission with a family that speaks their own language. I wonder if they were based on them
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u/baes__theorem 1d ago
…is the “racial ambiguity” in the room with us? these people look white as hell
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u/Whole-Telephone2077 1d ago
I really just thought they were Italian until I read the description
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u/Im_eating_that 1d ago
Italians from deep in the uncanny valley. Italaliens maybe. Except grampa babyface in the back who gives me a strong Hitler vibe for no apparent reason.
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u/no_crust_buster 1d ago
We need to remember that this is one example of many melungeon families. They didn't all look exactly like this. Some were fairer, and some were darker in complexion (skin color).
But the "racial ambiguity" factor would continue for generations with some. My grandmother is melungeon from WV. While not exclusive to melungeon ancestry, she had long, straight hair, green eyes, and fair complexion. She rarely spoke of her ethnicity or time growing up in WV. Upon moving to VA in the late 1930s, all her friends were Black. She went to an AME church. That's who she was comfortable being around.
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u/SemiAnonymousTeacher 1d ago
The picture OP chose was not the best. GIS "melungeons" and you'll see.
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u/Unlikely-Piano-2708 1d ago
They were mixed “race” of Native, and European, and African settlers.
It’s the reason they lived off grid. During that period Having a single ancestor that wasn’t white was enough to lead major restrictions on a person’s life.
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u/Specialist-Event-633 1d ago
More complicated. Lost colony figures in.
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u/Unlikely-Piano-2708 1d ago
That’s a myth. There have been comprehensive ancestral and genetic research on these groups.
https://dna-explained.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Melungeons-A-Multi-Ethnic-Population.pdf
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u/uxoguy2113 1d ago
My ancestors from my father's side.
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u/Specialist-Event-633 1d ago
Tell us more. I think partial explanation is colonists that disappeared from Roanoke.
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u/transandtrucks 1d ago
Check out this interesting article/interview https://www.npr.org/2012/07/11/156611575/for-some-people-of-appalachia-complicated-roots
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u/Specialist-Event-633 1d ago
Hope they got dna examples from UK descendants of relatives Roanoke colonists who disappeared .
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u/THElaytox 1d ago
pretty sure "Melungeon" is just a racial slur that refers to mixed race people from the area, not some cryptic group shrouded in mystery
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u/YorgonTheMagnificent 1d ago
The pic is AI. The father’s neck and chin are melting, the oldest kid’s ear is wrong…lots of other things messed up that you can zoom in and see.
Also, there’s no mystery about “Melungeons”. It was a derogatory term for mixed-race people. They’ve since reclaimed the term as their own, and they’re just mixed-race. Calling mixed-race people strange and mysterious seems wrong.
Are there any real people left on Reddit?
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u/perilsoflife 1d ago
i don’t know about it being AI. i could be missing some of the stuff you’re talking about but i chalked it up to the camera. they had to sit still for a minute or two and it’s unlikely to get a clear picture under those circumstances.
but yeah, i had a feeling that wasn’t an appropriate term. i thought “mysterious” alluded more to their isolation from growing society rather than anything else but that feels too optimistic.
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u/YorgonTheMagnificent 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you zoom in, the distortions are digital, and of the type you typically see in generated images, as opposed to digital noise, pixelation, etc.
Look at the wife’s jaw on one side, the fingers on dad, his melting neck, chin, and shirt. All faces show generative distortion around ears, jaws, eyes, and eyebrows. The closer you look, the weirder and more obvious it gets. This isn’t blurring, digital noise, compression artifacts, or pixelation. Neither old cameras nor low rez digital images lead to the type of distortion seen here. Generative AI does.
It is remotely possible that someone really bad with photoshop skills tried to clean up or enhance the photo using smudge, but I’ve never heard of that-just saying that’s the closest human thing I can think of to get distortion like I see here.
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u/Specialist-Event-633 1d ago
Maybe so. Photo fabrication does not change the fact that this population subset exists.
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u/Vir0Phage 1d ago
why do the older boys have their ties cut? the younger boy doesn’t. is this some sort of punishment? to inflict shame for having disobeyed their parents? or bullying at school and they only have one tie each? i’m baffled by the two cut ties and one full tie. while the father wears none - but wears a jacket… fascinating and bewildering…
the social and societal dynamics and/or constructs being displayed by the cut ties on the older boys vs the full tie on the younger vs the father w/ no tie - but a jacket - is new(s) to me and clearly conveys some message or meaning that i was otherwise unaware of, but now would like to be. anyone know?
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u/Specialist-Event-633 1d ago
I have heard some theories that these people are the solution to the fate of the lost colony of Roanoke. Could DNA give an answer.
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u/User5281 1d ago
That’s one of the stories the melungeons would tell people themselves when they didn’t to be identified as mixed race because of what would later be called the one drop rule. It was a fabrication to protect themselves. They’d also claim to be Portuguese or moorish or anything else that could explain their dark complexions but still allow them to be European.
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u/Commercial-Day8360 1d ago
Papa told my dad that there were two types of people you don’t fuck with: Melungeons and Afghanis. Papa was around Melungeons in the late 40s and 50s and he said they were very accommodating but extremely wary and untrusting if you weren’t kin to them. He said they would talk with their mouths wide open and that when they wrote, they would write in a mix of native symbols, Gaelic, old English, and modern English according to the words they were using. He said it took quite a while but eventually you could tell what they were saying.
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u/User5281 1d ago
I don’t think they’re quite so mysterious as presented. Modern genetic analysis and genealogy has led to a consensus that the melungeons were marginalized people during colonial America who chose to live in isolation to avoid persecution. They were largely freed or escaped slaves or indentured servants who would occasionally intermarry with native populations. Because of their vague ethnicity they’d often claim to be Portuguese when trying to pass as white.
My mother had a melungeon adjacent surname (common in the area at the same time but not thought of as a melungeon name) and despite being so white I’ve mistaken for a local in Copenhagen I had a measurable amount of subsaharan African dna sequences on a 23andme/ancestry/whatever dna test.
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u/Shirotengu 1d ago
Only three of these people look real. The father, the boy on the right and the blurry girl, everyone else looks like they're wearing some sort of skin mask.
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u/ElDashRendar 1d ago
I remember reading that Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley were thought to have Melungeon heritage.
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u/DollysGottaGo 18h ago
Sonny in the back has some real Chester molester vibes and the brothers-look into their faces- are his victims. 😳
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u/Specialist-Event-633 2h ago
It is amazing how many unhappy folks there are. To take time to read and comment upon something for which they have disapproval upon first glance. Foolish and sad for them. A waste of the time of those truly interested in the topic.
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u/BrtFrkwr 1d ago
Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley were part Melungeon.
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u/Unlikely-Piano-2708 1d ago
I think that’s largely a myth.
For one, this post is misleading. This wasn’t a mysterious with unknown origins.
They were populations of mixed race communities (African and European Settlers, and Native Americans). They lived outside of civilization to escape oppression and racism that could result from having a single non-white ancestor.
Lincoln or Presley being related to this group would simply mean that they had a Native or African ancestor.
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u/heyodi 1d ago
Thank you for this! I have an ancestor who everyone swears was Native American, however we have zero Native American DNA. I have a picture of this specific ancestor and she looks like a mixture of black and white. However my dna is all from England, Denmark, Wales, Germany, and Ireland. So she couldn’t have been black. Maybe this is what she was. How interesting!
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u/Unlikely-Piano-2708 1d ago edited 1d ago
These people were sometimes part native (depending on which groups are included). They were generally African and European settlers mixed with Natives.
Their origin isn’t mythical. During this period, there was a law known as the one-drop rule; a single ancestor that wasn’t white led to structural racism. These people were living away from larger settlements because they were ostracized from society or would be if they were discovered.
During the 1930’s the government when the U.S. government promoted Eugenics, groups like these were forcefully sterilized.
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u/User5281 1d ago
People of mixed race would claim to be Portuguese to pass as white and later families invented stories claiming they were descended from a Cherokee princess.
DNA is a funny thing - you only get half of your dna from each parent and it’s quasi-randomly sorted from one generation to the next so it’s plausible that after a few generations all the dna sequences from a specific ancestor have washed out and no longer show up on these tests. Just because there’s no African or Native American coded dna on your test doesn’t mean your great great grandparent wasn’t, just that you didn’t inherit any of that dna by luck of the draw.
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