CHASE-L Archives

Archiver > CHASE > 2002-06 > 1024582491


From: (Jeffrey Chace)
Subject: [CHASE-L] Wired News :The 'Lost Tribe' of Appalachia
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 07:14:53 -0700 (PDT)


A note from Jeffrey Chace:

Interesting story involving genealogical aspects and the search for ancestry.

============================================================

From Wired News, available online at:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,53165,00.html

The 'Lost Tribe' of Appalachia
By Kristen Philipkoski

2:00 a.m. June 17, 2002 PDT
Kevin Jones wanted to study the genetics of the rare diseases common
to a mysterious sub-population in Appalachia called the Melungeons. What he discovered was a group of people starving for information about their heritage.

The Melungeons make up about 50,000 of the 22 million people who live
in the mountainous region just inside the eastern seaboard, most of them in the southern edge of Appalachia in the area where Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky meet.


See also: -
The Code of Life as a Paint Set -
Ethical Concerns at the DNA Bank -
DNA Prescribed for Women's Health -
Check yourself into Med-Tech



There seem to be as many stories of how these people came to be as
there are Melungeons to tell them: They're from the abandoned colony of Roanoke, they're Portuguese shipwreck descendants, or maybe they're one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Many of these tales are greeted with skepticism and even hostility from historians.

They were first documented at the end of the 18th century. But the
first Melungeons knew they were Melungeons simply because their not-so-friendly neighbors said they were.

"Being in the same geographical region and being non-white, they had
to come up with something to call us because that's what white folks did then, so they could segregate you and treat you differently," said Wayne Winkler, president of the Melungeon Heritage Association.

The origin of the name, which was considered derogatory until
recently, is disputed as much as the heritage. It might be a version of the French word for mix: mélange, or from an African word malungo, meaning shipmate, or the Turkish melun jinn, meaning "cursed soul."

Now Melungeons are looking to new genetic research from Kevin Jones, a
molecular biologist at the University of Virginia's College at Wise, for answers. Unfortunately, he thinks they'll be disappointed.

The results will give some hints and suggestions about the origins of
the population as a whole, he said, but won't tell anyone definitively whether they are or aren't Melungeon, or exactly how they came to live in Appalachia.

"I think it's a study that raised a lot of expectation and will
actually provide relatively few answers," said Jones, who has been gathering and studying DNA samples from Melungeons for about two years.

Jones will announce his results at a gathering of the Melungeon
Heritage Association on Thursday.

Throughout history Melungeons have either been discriminated against
because of their ethnicity, or denied an ethnic history altogether by historians skeptical of their theories.

"The truth of the matter is, we probably would never have taken an
interest in DNA or genes except for the fact that scholars and academia have historically dismissed the early Melungeon claims of having at least some of their background in Mediterranean heritage," said Brent Kennedy, president of the Wellmont Foundation and author of The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People: An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America.

His book suggests that Portuguese sailors brought Turkish slaves to
America -- they joined with female Cherokee Indians and other tribes in the area to engender the first Melungeons in the 1500s.

He also asserts that Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley and Ava Gardner
may have had Melungeon ancestry.

One skeptic is David Henige, an oral tradition and historical
methodology expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He calls Kennedy's book, which asserts that Melungeons may be of Turkish descent, "bad history."

"My objection to Brent Kennedy's book was that it was so ahistorical
in its use of evidence," Henige said. "DNA testing might show that they are descended from Turks like he said, and that's fine -- if that's what it shows, that's what it shows. But I have no reason to expect it would."

He said there is simply no evidence to corroborate the theory,
although he concedes that events in history have certainly taken place that bear no evidence.

Jones' study might provide at least some proof of Middle Eastern
roots.

"There are some (DNA sequences) that clearly do reflect non-European
origin, that are of Middle Eastern or Northern Indian origin," Jones said. He wouldn't say anything more specific about the results, however.

Jones gathered the DNA of about 120 Melungeon women and sequenced
their mitochondrial DNA, a type of DNA that women pass down through generations.

A lab in England is also helping analyze about 30 Y-chromosome DNA
samples from men, but Jones isn't sure if those will be ready in time for the meeting.

While the study might provide a certain amount of information about a
population, it can't tell much about individuals, Jones said.

"It may be that 70 percent of a population shows a particular
sequence. So if a sequence matches that, statistically you have a chance of that reflecting your background," Jones said. "But it's not geared towards the individual like people want it to be."

He also said that some sequences associated with ethnicities stand out
in a person's genome more prominently than others.

"There are some unusual and fairly unique ones out there, but others
you find anywhere worldwide," he said.

European sequences are next to impossible to categorize according to
country because Europeans have migrated quickly through the centuries. This historical intermingling of ethnicities has made modern European DNA an unidentifiable mishmash.

"I think overall what the study will show is that the population is
very mixed," Jones said.

Related Wired Links:

Handheld Delivers the 411 on DNA
May 21, 2002

A Good Sequence, Easy to Dance To
May 21, 2002

X-Files: Science Fact or Fiction?
May 18, 2002

Copyright (C) 1994-2002 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved.



This thread: