As my website goes into it's 9th year I thought it was time to change the look and title. Many researchers are where they were in 2002 and refuse to budge, no matter how much new evidence turns up, looking for DNA to prove something it cannot possibly prove.
Claiming but a handful of people called Melungeons confined to a 28 mile stretch of land and excluding known Melungeon settlements as old as Newman's Ridge, is stifling the research of who these people were, where they came from and why they were called Melungeons.
While they acknowledge the possibility of the Native American mixing with Europeans pre-1600s and many card carrying Native Americans do not have Native American haplogroups they maintain the Melungeons are European and African in ancestry.
The evidence is overwhelming the Melungeons were Indians. Period. Whether those Indians had mixed with Spanish, French, German, English, Portuguese or African, the fact remains, they were Indians.
From the earliest research of Dr. Swan Burnett, Hamilton McMillan, James Mooney, Furman McDonald, Stephen B. Weeks, Judge John Lee and a host of others in the late 1800s comes the fact they were Indian and were a branch of the Croatans, known today as the Lumbee.
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Below are some of the articles written on the research of the Redbones, Croatan and Melungeons in the latter part of the 1800s into the 1900... -
The Nashville American of June 26, 1910 published a paper of about 10 pages in celebration of its 98th anniversary. One of these pag...
