Welcome to the Melungeon Heritage Association Website
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Thirteenth Union: A Melungeon Gathering
Celebrating the Diversity of Appalachia
MHA is excited to be holding Thirteenth Union, at Chief Logan Conference Center in Logan, West Virginia on June 26 & 27, 2009. This gathering is sponsored by MHA and West Virginia Humanities Council. MHA is also working in partnership with Logan County Genealogical Society, Harmony 365, and Logan Area Public Library. We are also joined this year by the support of staff from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History as well as the Logan Chamber of Commerce as well as other organizations and individuals.
Walk ins Are Welcome / To speed up your registration, download the registration form, complete it and bring it with you.
For initial and updated information on the gathering, please refer to 13th Union on the toolbar to the left.
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13th Union Presenters
MHA is proud to announce the return of several favorite voices at the 13th Union as well as some new voices.
Continue to check back on this website for more information as we will be adding to it regularly.
Melungeon Voices will screen at the MHA conference early Friday evening, June 26th.
Dr. Arwin Smallwood, of the University of Memphis, is slated for Saturday morning, June 27th.
To read more about both and to view a clip of Professor Smallwood’s interview with Ms.Dixon, click here.
Chowan Discovery Group Executive Director Marvin T. Jones will be the last lecture Friday afternoon,June 26th.
To read more about Jones' work, click here.
Dr. Terry Mullins will present a lecture on Melungeons on Friday morning at the gathering; before 13th Union, he will be presenting at the Cross - Cultural Institute in Las Vegas being held June 11 - June 12. Read more
Frank Sweet, author of Legal History of the Color Line will present Saturday morning on Prehistoric Migrations and Adaptations read more here
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Mixing in the Mountains
John Shelton Reed
One January day in 1996, I picked up the Wall Street Journal to find a story headlined "Rural County Balks at Joining Global Village."[2] It told about Hancock County, Tennessee, which straddles the Clinch River in the ridges hard up against the Cumberland Gap, where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet. This is a county that has lost a third of its 1950 population, which was only ten thousand to begin with. A third of those left are on welfare, and half of those with jobs have to leave the county to work. The only town is Sneedville, population 1300, which has no movie theater, no hospital, no dry cleaner, no supermarket, and no department store.
I read this story with a good deal of interest, because the nearest city of any consequence is my hometown of Kingsport, 35 miles from Sneedville as the crow flies, but an hour and a half on mountain roads. (If you don't accept my premise that Kingsport is a city of consequence, Knoxville's a little further from Sneedville, in the opposite direction.)
The burden of the article was that many of Hancock County's citizens are indifferent to the state of Tennessee's desire to hook them up to the information superhighway -- a job which will take some doing, especially for the one household in six that doesn't have a telephone. The Journal quoted several Hancock Countians to the effect that they didn't see the point. The reporter observed that the county offers "safe, friendly ways, pristine rivers, unspoiled forests and mountain views," and that many residents simply "like things the way they are."
So far a typical hillbilly-stereotype story. But the sentence that really got my attention was this: "Many families here belong to 100 or so Melungeon clans of Portuguese and American Indian descent, who tend to be suspicious of change and have a history of self-reliance."
Now, I picture the typical Wall Street Journal reader as a harried commuter on the Long Island Railroad, and I wondered what in the world he made of that. What's this "Melungeon" business? And what are Portuguese doing up those remote east Tennessee hollers? You might well ask.
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“Melungeon Voices”
A film by Julie Williams Dixon and Warren Gentry.
Now available for sale on the site listed below
The film tells the complex story of the Melungeons using interviews, family photographs, and archival documents.
The film is beautifully shot with haunting time lapse scenes from atop Newman’s Ridge and wandering scenes from Stone Mountain, and other locations throughout our region. Seven years in the making it is as interesting to those who’ve been studying Melungeon history for years as it is to newcomers.
A preview of the film can be found at www.melungeonvoices.com
Read more here
Plecker's Infamous 1943 List
The head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946, Walter Ashby Plecker, 
believed “there is a danger of the ultimate disappearance of the white race in Virginia, and the country, and the substitution therefore of another brown skin, as has occurred in every other country where the two races have lived together.” This “mongrelization,” in Plecker’s view, caused of the downfall of several earlier civilizations. He was determined to prevent this in America, or at least in Virginia.
In January of 1943, Plecker sent a circular to all public health and county officials in Virginia, listing, county by county, the surnames of all families suspected of having African ancestry. The cover letter stated that they were “mongrels” and were now trying to register as white. The names listed in the southwestern Virginia counties included Collins, Gibson, Moore, Goins, Bunch, Freeman, Bolin, Mullins, as well as other local area surnames. You can read more inside.
Alther's Kinfolks
Best-selling author Lisa Alther chronicles her search for missing branches of her family tree in this dazzling, hilarious memoir. A babysitter told Lisa about the Melungeons: six-fingered child-snatchers who hid in caves. Forgetting about these creepy kidnappers until she had a daughter of her own, Lisa learned they were actually an isolated group of dark-skinned people living in East Tennessee. She set out to discover who these mysterious Melungeons really were—and why her grandmother wouldn’t let her visit their Virginia relatives.Part sidesplitting travelogue, part how (and how not) to climb your family tree, KINFOLKS shimmers with wicked humor, showing just how wacky and wonderful our human family really is.
