Dear Ms. P.,
Ah, well, here we go again. You are probably not going to like "my" definition since it is not self-referential, or anecdotal, or prescriptive, but purely descriptive, based on the usage and evolution of the word in public history sources. Let me say at the outset that I am not a Melungeon, though most of my family lines have been called that, and carry most of the medical conditions associated with Melungeon health, and have been discriminated against in most of the ways discussed on the Melungeon-L list, and even were named in Warren Pleckner's hideous campaign against people of color in the 30s and 40s. To this day my mother, a Cooper who was born in Jackson County, Alabama, and is 88 years old, does not have a birth certificate because her father refused to "register" her. He also refused to get a Social Security Number. I do not identify with the Melungeon Movement personally. I sympathize with it and wish it well, but I am not one to register. I am also a member of no recognized American Indian tribe, though I am descended from Choctaw and Cherokee chiefs who signed treaties with the U.S. government that were spread upon the laws of the land "as long as the grass grows and the rivers run," and I identify with that race primarily.

To talk about what I am, I am a trained philologist, archivist and historian. Using the disciplines I know, I have drafted the following footnote that will appear in the book I am co-authoring with Elizabeth Hirschman. It explains some of the true, some of the twisted, and some of the false meanings that have been given to the term Melungeon.

Melungeons are sometimes also referred to as Black Dutch. On the beginnings of the use of this term in U.S. history to refer to Hollanders of dark appearance (without any mention of Melungeons or Jews), see Mary Bondurant Warren, editor, Family Puzzlers, July 22, 1976, No. 457; reprinted in USGenNet http://www.tngenweb.org/cherokee_by_blood/dutch.htm. (Warren is a reputable source, as she served as Historian of the state of Georgia.) The same people were often called Portuguese in colonial Virginia and Carolina records (Gallegos 1997). A connection between the two terms lies in the Sephardic Jewish merchants who settled in the Dutch Republic following its independence from Spain, who called themselves, ambiguously, gente del linaje, or homens da nação, or “Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation” (on which, Bodian 1997, without any knowledge of Melungeons), and who streamed into Britain, and thence to America, beginning with the mission of Amsterdam chief rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel to readmit Jews under Cromwell (Wall 1987). The first known use of the word Melungeon in U.S. records (“Melungin”) occurs in the minutes of the Primitive Baptist Church of Stony Creek, Tennessee, in 1813 (Goins 2000, p. 9), where it is applied to certain “irregular” members with the surnames Minor, Gibson, and Collins who fraternized with the Sizemores (Cismar), a mixed Portuguese Jewish and American Indian family, on Blackwater Creek (see Horton n.d.; Appendix A for Sizemore DNA). Mere knowledge of such a rare term, thought to be Arabic (“cursed souls”), must have come from the Collins, Goins, Sizemores and others, who moved in a Caribbean and Spanish-Portuguese orbit. These and other families who clustered on Newmans Ridge were many years later labeled as Melungeon by a Nashville journalist named Drumgoole (1890), and the term has stuck. She was a descendant of a Scots trader among the Cherokee, Alexander Drumgoole (d. 1837), whose mixed-blood daughter Nannie the Pain married Cherokee chief Doublehead (d. Aug. 9, 1807). Drumgoole is credited with popularizing many elements of the legend, at a time when New York travel writers were inventing “hillbillies” (Benjamin Albert Botkin, A Treasury of Southern Folklore [New York: Crown Publishers, 1949], pp. 85-86). The term Melungeon also is used in Brazilian history of settlements by Portuguese Jews and Moorish adventurers among the Amerindians of the Wild Coast. Strictly speaking, then, it does not “belong” exclusively to people of Newmans Ridge and surrounding area.

I believe, then, that Melungeon is a very problematical term per se. If a term is needed to refer to mixed descent early inhabitants of the lower Appalachians, it would probably be better to use something like "people of color." No term is needed for Jews in that population except Jewish, because they did not usually consider themselves "mixed," even if known Indian or black occurred in the family, but rather just the opposite, pure -- that's why they married each other. Remember, too, that Jewish is a religious designation, not racial. The irony is that bigots regard Jews as mixed and "mongrel" -- I keep hearing that word in particular, as though Jews were dogs, not human beings. BTW, not only am I not registered, but I don't even have "papers" :)
Best regards,
Donald Panther-Yates