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August 4, 2005
Field Guide to North American Melungeons
I was watching the "I-Can't-Believe-He-Killed-Her-Channel" the other night and they were talking about the Melungeons of the Appalachian Mountains. Somehow, I had managaged to struggle through my insular existence up to this point blissfully unaware of their existence. Apparently, this group of people was living in the Appalachian mountains when the European settlers of North America migrated westward through the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, they discovered a mongrelized race of European people already living there, but thoroughly mixed through miscegenation. There's actually a Field Guide to the Melungeons. Pretty wild. It wasn't in any of my history books, I can assure you of that.
Update: Apparently, another group of people known as the Ginger Kids, is sheer fiction. I saw it on SouthPark, so I figured it had to be true, but, as it turns out, Wikipedia claims it's fictitious. The International Ginger Kid Foundation(IGKF) is funny, but fictitious.
Posted by Peenie Wallie on August 4, 2005 at 10:55 PM
Comments
Question:
I was reading about the Melungeons, and in my wonderings around the South- I have frequently heard the expression of "Free Issue" people or "Issue" people. Were they blacks that were set free prior to the civil war?
Posted by: Robert Edney on July 22, 2006 at 8:04 PM
According to this site, a "free issue" was:
"A Black or mixed-race person free by manumission or birth; especially the child of a White woman and a Black man. Commonly used in Virginia and the Carolinas."
Manumission is defined as "the act of freeing a slave, done at the will of the owner."
Posted by: Peenie Wallie on July 23, 2006 at 5:11 PM