Nuri Erta

Story of Wise-Cesme Sisterhood  By Nuri Ertan of Cesme, Turkey

The first introduction of Cesme to the Melungeons was in 1995.The first relations initiated by Turkey's then Tourism Attaché to the USA, Mr. Mustafa Siyahhan, was followed by Mr. Brent Kennedy and some of his friends' visit of Istanbul. The group also wished to travel to the Aegean and came to Cesme. The close interest of Mr. Osman Kabasakal, Cesme Tourism Director and the hospitality of Kaymakam (Provincial District Official) Atilla Dincer may have been one of the reasons why these people got connected with Cesme.

I met with these very valuable people a few months after their arrival. Brent Kennedy, with approximately 15 Melungeon friends of his, first came to Istanbul then Cesme. We prepared a very nice meeting ceremony for them, at the Izmir Adnan Menderes airport. Together we visited government officials, schools and tradesmen. Everyone showed big interest in these valuable people.
 

Karlton Douglas

AMERICAN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY By Karlton Douglas

American Indian Philosophy offers Great Wisdom to modern human beings. It spotlights how we treat God’s Creation, our Mother Earth, and how we treat each other. The common sense example of Native Americans is that they treated the environment in the greatest way possible, recognizing that we draw our lives from this planet—it is foolish not to take care of it, just as it is foolish not to take care of our own body. To American Indians every tree and stone was alive, and Mother Earth was a living entity in need of respect and protection—never to be abused or misused. To take care of this planet, to have generosity rather than greed, plus respect for our brothers and sisters on this planet, with a worshipful life-style, and (not a Sunday only religion), that is the soul and core of American Indian beliefs.
 

Barbados Research     By Brent Kennedy

 Here are a few more thoughts relating to Barbados and the possible Sizemore connection. I don’t have access to my original papers, but did locate some of the notes I made and have included them below. Also, remember that my major interest in Barbados was from a broad settlement influence, not so much for specific families. Also, the “old” Sizemores claimed to be Native American and that’s the position I took in my book and I have no reason to doubt them (a claim now supported by DNA research).
 

Elizabeth Hirschman

Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America     By Elizabeth Hirschman

I've sent to the www.melungeons.com website a brief overview of each chapter in my forthcoming book "Melungeons: The Last Lost Tribe in America". I hope this will clarify what the book proposes and what sources of evidence are used. I believe the book may now be advance-ordered from Mercer University Press. It contains nine chapters and uses a variety of documentary sources including historical writings, genealogies, archeological excavations, ethnography, religious traditions, migration patterns, naming practices and genetic testing data to support the thesis that the earliest non-Native settlers in Appalachia (ca. early 1500's CE onward) were Sephardic Jews and Muslim Moors who had been displaced from Iberia. It contains also several photographs, maps, charts and appendices, most of which have not been presented before in discussions of Melungeon/early Appalachian settlement.
 

Donald Panther-Yates

The Influence of Sephardic Jews and Moors on Southeastern Indian Cultures       By Donald Panther-Yates

Since the 1980s, I have often felt that my own life rather continued and completed Chief Yozip’s adventures as I found out I was descended from Choctaw and Cherokee chiefs (after being raised to believe that I was Scots-Irish and English), became the band chief of the New York and New Jersey Cherokees, taught at the Native College in Chicago, ran a public relations agency for indigenous rights work in Nashville, became an elder of the Thunderbird Clan of the Teehahnahmah People in Tennessee, and most recently—and perhaps most surprisingly – discovered through genealogy and DNA testing I am Sephardic Jewish. My 4th-great-grandfather Isaac Cooper married Nancy Black Fox, a daughter of the last great Cherokee chief, Black Fox, or Enola, participated in the founding of an important Jewish colony in Daniel Boone’s Kentucky, and died remembered as the first rabbi and endower of the Jewish cemetery in Wheeling, West Virginia. The Coopers trace themselves back to medieval France and the duchy of Toulouse where like the royal Stuart family they were retainers in the court of William the Conqueror, Knights Templar and Levites.

BARBADOS AND THE MELUNGEONS OF APPALACHIA     By L.E. Salazar

For the past 375 years Barbados has been Anglophone. Due to its position as the most easterly island in the Caribbean, it was early recognized to be of strategic naval and military importance and with the popularity of sugar which was introduced to the island by the Dutch from Brazil, the tiny island loomed large as Britain’s most prosperous colony. The spread of sugar plantations precipitated migration to the other colonies as those bondsmen who were to be paid in land at the end of their service were unable to secure the ten acres that was their due. May Lumsden states that from 1650 to 1680 nearly 30 000 of the 80 000 original settlers of Barbados moved on to the North American mainland or to other islands and credits this outflow to the North American colonies with the introduction of "ideas, capital, agricultural know-how, a gracious life-style, as well as a determination to work and prosper."[1][1] Today, many of the descendants of early settlers of America can trace their ancestry to Barbados so that as a foremost colony with unbroken records of its English speaking inhabitants since 1637, Barbados’ history cannot be discounted in any study of the English speaking Americas and its peoples.
 

Nancy and Brent Kennedy

Gypsies, Turks, Armenians, and East Indians on Our Early Shores: An Update on Continually Emerging Ethnic “Surprises”      By Brent Kennedy

Could Gypsies have been present this early in North America? Around 1000 A.D., Gypsies, who had originated in India, migrated westward to Turkey where they still reside in significant numbers, and then fanned out again into the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and, finally northern Europe. They carried with them their own rich culture and this they blended with other cultures as they migrated and intermarried. As they moved into Europe they took with them bits and pieces of Ottoman/Turkish/Byzantine culture, folklore, linguistics, religion (Islam), and even genetics (for excellent historical background, see David M. Crowe's, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1996, pp.1-30).  Much of this admixed Gypsy culture would eventually be carried into England by the early 1500s. Gypsy, or more properly, Romani scholars present an intriguing scenario of how Gypsy immigrants might have arrived in early America as slaves, servants, and even "English" settlers, complete with English surnames.

Darlene Wilson

Darlene Wilson and Patricia Beaver, "Transgressions in Race and Place: The Ubiquitous Native Grandmother in America's Cultural Memory" in Barbara Smith, ed., Neither Separate Nor Equal: Women, Race, and Class in the South, (Temple University Press, 1999).

This essay appears in a recent collection of essays about Southern women. For their subject, the two authors - a historian and an anthropologist working as an investigative team - examine the phenomenon of mixed-ancestry women in Appalachia, primarily those with Native American ancestry, especially Cherokee. They suggest that the mixed-ancestry Appalachian grandmother has been ignored by mainstream historians who try to explain Appalachian distinctiveness according to male Euro-American models. One of the identities given special attention is that of "Melungeon," a tri-racial group found only in southwest Virginia, eastern Kentucky and northeast Tennessee. For over a century, this group has been the subject of polite and not-so-polite scrutiny by elite society; for one primary source, the authors point to the private journals of Kentucky novelist John Fox, Jr. (1862-1919) who was especially curious about these "mountain niggers" of eastern Kentucky (p. 34).

VISITS TO THE MELUNGEONS AND TIDEWATER VIRGINIA GROUPS   By W. GROSVENOR POLLARD

During a visit to my parents in Oak Ridge, Tennessee the summer of 1962, I was introduced to a juvenile probation officer who had been assigned Hancock and Hawkins counties in northern Tennessee as part of his jurisdiction. His supervisor had informed him that there were several communities of a "mixed-blood" people known as Melungeons and claiming an American Indian identity in those counties, with the major concentration being on Newman's Ridge, northeast of Sneedville, in Hancock County. He was to visit this community to determine how to proceed with rehabilitating potential Melungeon juvenile offenders. 
 

Research Trip To Appalachia    By Mark O'Connor

My interest in the " Melungeon Movement" is about identifying more accurately the source of southern string band music, and more broadly the genesis of American cultural arts. It has been widely acknowledged that American music is equal part European culture, Black African culture and maybe a few doses of Latino culture as well. The tri-racial theory opens up the Mongoloid racial mix, and the obvious component for this part of it is Native American. But recently there has been a new theory floated in that the original ancestry of the Melungeon group just may have been Turkish or Portuguese. According to Spanish ship documents from the 1500's exploring America coming to the coasts of what is now Virginia and North Carolina, Spanish explorers kept Turkish slaves and Portuguese slaves on these boats and would drop them off on America's coast to fend for themselves while sometimes heading down to the Caribbean to capture more slaves to work the ships on the way back to Spain. There was quite a flow of Moorish people between Turkey and Portugal during that time, and often the Spaniards would utilize the Portuguese for their slave labor. Many of these people were Turks.

Alma Sioux Scarberry

Our French Connection    By Ted Klein

It's been a little more than four years since I got started in genealogy. I began with a subscription to the Prodigy online service with a good genealogy bulletin board, and a small list of family members going back three or four generations. I used "Family Tree Maker" computer software to organize my information. At that time I knew very little about my father's family and just a little more about my mother's family. My father's family all came to this country as 19th century immigrants from Germany who went to New York, all with very common German names, and they chose to never look back or keep any family contacts or records. By the first generation, born in this country, one would think that they had written the Declaration of Independence.
 

Sulaimon

The Need for a Moorish Museum    By Sulaimon

 The Moorish community is missing a key part I believe. We lack any kind of museum for our people. I know that this statement will be immediately met with questions on both sides of the argument. One may ask, what is the purpose for a museum? Well there are many important reasons for our community to have one. First it would validate us as a people; we would be able to recognize our Moorish ancestors and their history, but not only their history their contribution to this land and America. There are many Moors who served in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI, and WWII, and many other wars that have not gotten the recognition they deserve. They have not been recognized for their bravery and service to this country, a museum would allow us to tell their tales and honor them.