[Reily]

I remember reading and interesting theory about the Irish origins of the Melungeon.
This theory was claiming that they are a racial remnant of the original inhabitants of Ireland. In other words pre-Celtic.

[girlangler]

I read several newspaper articles about a book published in the 1990s, written by someone up in this area, that supposedly tied, with the help of DNA,the Melungeons to early middle eastern explorers. Very interesting story, the Melungeons.

Can't remember the title or author, but I'd bet the East Tennessee State University library could locate it, and most of what has been written about them.

The Melungeons are in one small pocket up here at the Tennessee/Kentucky/Virginia borders. Their history has been all but wiped out because the vital statistics records in the past had no way of identifying their race, and they were recorded as Indian, black American, etc.

[muawiyah]

The Melungeon are a complex mix of folks. One recent study revealed they have a gene-marker typical of a group of folks found only in Pakistan. That group, in turn, is descended from black African slaves brought there before America was discovered.

My own personal theory is that the Melungeons are descendants of men held as POWs at the Spanish POW camp in what is now South Carolina back in the 1500s. For the most part, the POWs were Eastern Orthodox, or Hindu, or anything but Moslem. I think the Spanish regularly tossed Islamic prisoners overboard.

At the same time there'd been a regular traffic of folks leaving Europe for America and winding up out in the woods in Virginia, etc. One estimate I ran across had about 20,000 such people running around what is now Maryland when Jamestown was founded. What were those folks doing and just where did they come from?

Compounding the problem of figuring out who and what the Melungeons were, there was a really serious drought on the East Coast from about 1575 to 1610. Simultaneously the Indian settlements at Angel Mounds, Cahokia and Terre Haute broke up, and you had all sorts of Indians traveling East, West, North and South, creating all sorts of mayhem and disruption. The Cherokee, who'd been West of the Mississippi, somehow ended up in the Appalachians. The "Eastern Cheyenne" were created. The Sioux obtained the horse and a whole new culture was created ~ but this time one that used what are clearly Sheng Dynasty Chinese characters as the basis for their sign language ~ which probably demonstrates that more than one Chinese cook on a Spanish ship checked out in South Carolina and ran as far as he could to escape those people.

America in the immediate post-Columbus period was exciting and disastrous. No doubt the Melungeon people came into being in those days.