MGC Genealogy
Research Experiences of Nancy Aiken during summer of 2003 with Tri-Racial Isolates
I spent Tuesday afternoons before MGC membership and board meetings this summer searching through the MGC collection in the Chesterhill branch of the Kate Love Simpson Library. I offered this service to a friend who lives in Washington State. She was interested in any information I could find on the surnames Richie and Niece. I knew she had visited courthouses in the mountainous counties near the Cumberland Gap. In fact, I had an ancestor who was married in 1817 in Granger County, TN. Of course I watched for my ancestor’s name, which was Blakeman. My friend had been telling me for years that I should be looking at Ft. Blakemore, which is in the area. My interest in this part of Tennessee grew when I found that marriage record and then an 1811 tax record in neighboring Hawkins County. I became quite interested when I learned that the so-called Melungeon enclave was in Hancock Co., TN, which had formerly been Hawkins Co.
Melungeon is a term sometimes used to refer to people of mixed race heritage whose ancestors settled in Tennessee at the end of the eighteenth century.
My friend has focused her genealogical research on proving her relationship to Davy Crockett. She has yet to establish that link, but she looks just like him if an old drawing she found is a true likeness. At any rate, her connection to the Richie family is Crockett Richie. She had reason to believe the Crockett Richie family had married into Melungeon families. Also, she had another ancestral family named Niece/Nees who was reported to have Native American blood.
Armed with that information I checked the list of items in the collection and chose the most promising for my particular search. The collection consists of books, theses, dissertations, published and unpublished papers, and newspaper articles. The papers and articles are found in four large binders numbered 1-4 and in colored two-pocket paper folders. A separate finding aid lists the contents of the binders and folders. The papers and articles date back to the late 19th century and they all concern isolated populations of peoples of mixed racial heritage.
The first book I picked had a family line leading straight back to Crockett Richie! (I have really good genealogy research luck.) I discovered that the current, best-known author on the Melungeons is a descendant of Crockett Richie. He is N. Brent Kennedy whose book The Melungeons was published in 1997. I probably could have rested on my laurels, but I plunged ahead.
A few Tuesday afternoons later, I found the surname Niece. People bearing that name moved from the main Melungeon enclave in Hancock Co. TN to nearby Knott Co., KY. My friend said she thought they might be from Kentucky.
I thought I had done a fair job for her, but I also learned a few things I could apply to my own research. I also learned a bit about the ancestry of many MGC members. Here are a few items that, I think, members might find interesting.
Greenbrier County, VA was an 18th century destination for mixed race people from North Carolina who were escaping the pressures of land-hungry Anglos. They were evicted from Greenbrier Co. 1773-1778 (The Melungeons, 1997), probably in much the same way they were more or less forced out of North Carolina.
“A Visit to the Melungeons” by C.H. Humble in Home Missions Monthly, Vol. 11 (1897), pp. 237-240 describes Humble’s visit with the Beatty Collins family in Blackwater Valley between Newman’s Ridge and Mulberry Ridge in Hancock Co., TN, the heart of the Melungeon enclave in Tennessee. The Collins family was among the earliest settlers of the enclave in the late 18th century.
A good paper is “Very Silly Mixt: Tri-Racial Isolate Families of the Upper South” by Virginia Easley DeMarce. It was published in 1980 in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.
Perhaps as many as 200 enclaves of “tri-racial isolates” have been in the Eastern United States. Some have disappeared due to out-marriages or migrations. For example, the so-called “Carmel Indians” of Highland County, OH who settled in the area about the time of the Civil War have dissolved. By 1950 the group included only 50 to 100 individuals. By 1996 they were gone. All of these enclaves claim some Native American ancestry. These were Indian survivors of disease, war and migration. That is, they remained alive and well in the East and left descendants. William Harlen Gilbert, Jr.’s 1948 report to the Smithsonian Institution identified several so-called Indian groups and listed their family names by location. For example, the Goins family was among both the so-called “Brass Ankles” of South Carolina and the “Melungeons” of Virginia and Tennessee. The Norris family was among the Werowocomoco Indians of Virginia and the “Guineas” of West Virginia. Edward T. Price in “A Geographic Analysis of White-Negro-Indian Racial Mixtures in Eastern United States” from 1953 also identifies the groups and, in addition, notes that Goins is a common name among the so-called “Redbones” of southwest Louisiana.
According to Haithcock & Haithcock (1996) and Berry Brewton’s “Marginal Groups” immigration of tri-racial people into southeastern Ohio began in the 1790s. Some of these people claim Cherokee ancestry. Some lineages have been traced to the Saponi and Tutelo Indian tribes of the Roanoke River area of Virginia. By the 1740s many members of these tribes took English surnames and, hence, were traceable in deeds, census, and other records. Many of these families came to Ohio at the request of the Quakers and a number settled in and around the Quaker community of Chesterhill. Of the English surnames adopted by the Saponi and Tutelo Indians listed by the Haithcocks, these are found in the 1850 census for Morgan County, Ohio: Allen, Anderson, Bird, Brown, Evans, Hammond, Harris, Hayes, Hays, Hicks, Jones, Long, Martin, McGee, Morgan, Scott, Steward, Stewart, Wade, Watkins, White, Wilkins, and Wilson.
Edward T. Price in “A Geographic Analysis of White-Negro-Indian Racial Mixtures in Eastern United States” (1953) lists several surnames common among the “Guinea” population in West Virginia. These include Croston, Kennedy, Dalton and Newman, but, he notes, that nearly one half the families have the surname, Mayle. The Mayle family came from Hampshire County, Virginia.
Henry Price in “Melungeon’s: The Vanishing Colony of Newman’s Ridge” (1971) notes that in 1760 a group of hunters entered what is now Hancock County, TN and one of them was named Newman. By 1770 long hunters knew the name of Newman’s Ridge, which lay between the Holston and Clinch Rivers. By 1772 permanent settlers were in the region. The 1790 census indicates 361 “other free persons” were in the area that became Tennessee. The 1810 census makes it clear that there was a colony of dark-skinned people on the ridges near the Clinch River.
According to Paul Heinegg in Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia (1994) North Carolina had a discriminatory tax that described taxables as white males 16 years old and up; Negroes and mixed males and females age 12 and up, and white persons intermarrying with Negroes or mixed people (pp. 8-9). An example given was that of Michael Going/Gowen who was taxed in Granville County, N.C. as white in 1754, but as Michael Goin, mulattoe, in 1759. Also, both Thomas and Michael Gowin “refused to list his wife” in a 1761 tax list (p. 9). Nearly 90 years later in Nov 1841, William Goings was granted a license to carry a gun in Robeson Co., N.C. (p. 15).
Finally, Heinegg noted that a Woodson family in Southampton County, VA was described as Nottoway Indians (pp. 16-17).
A major project for the future would be to index this valuable collection.
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