Thursday, October 14, 2010

Barbados Link May Provide "Smoking Gun" Clue to Melungeon Surnames

Barbados Link May Provide "Smoking Gun" Clue to Melungeon Surnames

(with permission of the author)


Melungeon ancestry possibilities have expanded to include significant numbers of "English" and "Scotch" settlers who came to South Carolina in the late 1600s and early 1700s, but not from England. Although these people held English citizenship, their actual ethnic make-up was far different from the prototype Anglos of that period. These settlers were from Barbados, ethnically mixed people seeking better lives in the mainland colonies.

These so-called "freedmen" tended to be a mixture of English and Scotch, native Barbadians (i.e. Indian), Portuguese Jews, other Mediterranean people, and Africans. And, most telling, their surnames match those English names that most commonly show up among the earliest Melungeon populations. It would seem likely that, over time, these ethnically mixed "Englishmen" would have indeed moved northward and admixed with Melungeon ancestral groups in the Carolinas and Virginia. There are many related documents detailing the movements of these early settlers, but one will suffice for this first announcement (this document kindly provided by Angela Andrews of the University of Virginia). John Camden Hotten's work on the Barbados settlers provides the following astonishing surname list of "English" settlers from Barbados: (see below for Library of Congress citations)

Freedman
Clark
Hall
Kennedy
Phipps

Portuguese Jews
Atkins
Cole
Isham
Miner
Sizemore

Prisoners
Adams
Atkins
Bennett
Collins
Cooke
Cox
Crow
Dale
Denham
Dennis
Dyer
Greene
Hall
Hill
Hillman
Lockbeare (Lockleare)
Moore
Mullins
Nash
Osborne
Reeves
Weaver
White
Williams
Willis

These surnames are virtually a directory of Melungeon surnames, and can potentially play a major role in demonstrating how specific English and Scotch-Irish names popped up among the various Melungeon populations. It also reaffirms how the official U.S. census records can be misleading regarding race, ethnicity, and actual origin. These people were all legitimate "English" and "Scotch-Irish" settlers, and would have passed this heritage along to their offspring. But ethnically they were of mixed European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and African origin. One more lesson in the flaws of unquestionably accepting the written census record as "fact."

Additional data relating to the possible Barbados connection will be posted in the near future, but hopefully this first post will spur others to look more carefully as the often mentioned "West Indies" connection within their families.

Provided by Brent Kennedy
December 2, 1997

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