Do you have stories that have come down through the generations about Melungeons in the family tree?

First, who are the Melungeons?

Wikipedia defines them as: Melungeons are a group of people from Appalachia who predominantly descend from northern or central Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. Their ancestors were likely brought to Virginia as indentured servants in the mid-17th century.

There are a number of specific surnames associated with Melungeon families, one of them being Riddle, which is one of my husband’s maternal family lines.

As with many families, there is lore stating that my mother-in-law’s family has Cherokee ancestry.

I’ve only been able to document two possible places for Native American ancestry to enter the family tree. The first is through Henry Alberty, son of North Carolina Revolutionary War soldier Frederick Alberty. Henry’s wife was Rebecca, maiden name unknown. Henry lived in some of the same areas as the Cherokee and his half brother, Moses Alberty, was enrolled in the tribe. So, yes, it’s possible.

The second possible connection is through my mother-in-law’s Riddle family, which goes back to Moses Riddle, probably born in the 1720s and who appears in the 1767 Pittsylvania County, Virginia tax rolls, noted as “Indian.”

I was quite elated to find a 2011 study on line authored by Roberta Estes, Jack Goins, Penny Ferguson and Janet Lewis Crain titled Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population and published in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy, Volume 7, no. 1.

It seems that, although Moses was noted as an Indian in the tax list, his Y-DNA is strictly European so his patrilineal line is eliminated as having Native American ancestry. That still leaves two possibilities – that his mother was Native American or possibly that he married a Native American. Some tax collectors routinely classified such mixed race households as Indian or mulatto.

It also puts Moses Riddle as only a tangential member of the Melungeons with the added connection of a descendant marrying into the Melungeon community.

This study answered a couple of questions for me. First, Moses is ethnically European with a haplogroup of R1b1b2. Second, I also learned that the 1778 tax list of “concealed tithables” also included the name of Moses Riddle.

Roberta Estes and I have run into each other at the FamilySearch Library during RootsTech conferences and she writes a terrific blog – DNAeXplained – Genetic Genealogy, which I follow. Jack Goins has led the way investigating Melungeon origins.

So, if you have Melungeons in the family, you’ll love reading Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population, which documents and eliminates potential origins through a detailed DNA study.