Resilience, identity, and generations of interconnected Appalachian families
I already knew we were mixed. That was never the revelation.
What I didn’t know was all of the family names, how many of those families were connected to one another, or exactly how deep their roots reached into America’s past.
The farther I followed my father’s family backward, the more familiar names began appearing. Mullins. Gibson. Collins. Sizemore. Justice. Thacker. Stallard. Akers. Ratliff. Webb. Addington. Blackburn. And still more.
Some are names researchers have associated directly with historic Melungeon communities. Others entered my family through generations of marriages among families living across the same Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Carolina backcountry.
I didn’t find one distant Melungeon ancestor hiding in an otherwise unrelated family tree. I kept finding families, and then I found more of them. The farther back I went, the more I began to understand that this wasn’t simply one interesting branch of my father’s ancestry. These were the people who made up much of the tree.
A Word Written Down in 1813
There is one reason the word Melungeon holds a particularly important place in my understanding of my heritage. It involves my fifth great-grandmother, Susan, or Susanna, Stallard.
On September 26, 1813, the members of Stony Creek Baptist Church in Scott County, Virginia, gathered for a church meeting. During the meeting, Sister Kitchen brought a complaint against Susanna Stallard.
The surviving church minutes record the accusation:
“Susanna Stallard for saying she harbored them Melungins.”
It is a tiny fragment of an ordinary disagreement between two women. More than two hundred years later, it is extraordinary.
The 1813 Stony Creek minutes contain one of the earliest surviving written appearances of the word that would eventually be spelled Melungeon, and my fifth great-grandmother is standing right there in the middle of it.
That does not prove Susanna herself was Melungeon, nor do I need it to. Its importance to me is different.
The word existed in her world. The people sitting in that church apparently understood who was being discussed. Nobody stopped the meeting to define a “Melungin.” The clerk simply wrote it down.
For me, that makes Melungeon more than a term encountered in a genealogy book generations later. The word is embedded in my family’s historical landscape.
They Were Already Here
One of the strangest things about tracing my father’s ancestry was discovering just how long these families had been in America. By the middle of the eighteenth century, most of the ancestral lines I have traced were already here.
But when we hear the words colonial ancestors, our imaginations often go somewhere that doesn’t resemble the world I found in my genealogy. I wasn’t looking primarily at wealthy planters, prominent merchants, or people living at the center of colonial society.
Again and again, I found people farther out. They were backcountry people living along rivers and creeks, moving into newly settled territory, establishing farms and communities, joining small churches, marrying people from neighboring families, and continuing farther into the mountains.
Long before modern state borders made these places seem separate, families moved through Virginia and the Carolinas and eventually into the mountain country of Tennessee, Kentucky, and what became West Virginia.
That movement is important to the larger Melungeon story as well. Historical and genealogical research has traced families later associated with Melungeon communities from Virginia and North Carolina into northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. Newman’s Ridge and Blackwater Valley in what became Hancock County, Tennessee, eventually became the best-known Melungeon communities, but those communities were part of a much larger network of families and migrations.
My own family tree moves through that same broader backcountry world.
The Families Behind the Name
There is a temptation when discussing Melungeon genealogy to produce a list of surnames: Collins, Gibson, Mullins, Goins, Bunch, Bowlin, Denham. Those are among the surnames identified with some of the earliest documented Melungeon families.
But surnames alone cannot tell this story. Not every Mullins was Melungeon. Neither was every Gibson, Collins, or person carrying another surname later associated with Melungeon families. The geography matters. The records matter. Above all, the relationships matter.
That’s what became so striking when I began looking at my own genealogy. The names didn’t simply appear independently. They connected.
Families married into other families. Their children married into still others. Generations later, branches crossed again. A surname that seemed unrelated at first could lead back into another family I had already encountered several generations earlier.
Eventually, the genealogy stopped looking like a collection of separate family names.
It began looking like a community.
My Mullins Family
The Mullins line is one of the clearest examples.
My family traces through James Booker Mullins and his wife, Mary Polly Newsome, and through descendants who lived in the mountain country around Grassy Creek, Russell and Buchanan counties in Virginia, and the surrounding Virginia-Kentucky borderlands.
Later generations include John Wesley Mullins and Mariah Reed, George Washington Mullins and Martha Lurinda Fuller, and still more Mullins descendants. These aren’t simply names from a list of people historically associated with Appalachia. They are branches leading toward people my family actually knew.
Then there is Lena.
Lena Mullins is not merely a name several generations removed from me on a genealogy chart. She belongs to family memory, and when I think about Lena, I remember butter mints.
That tiny detail may seem insignificant beside church records, racial classifications, migration patterns, and centuries of genealogy. To me, it isn’t. It is exactly the point.
Genealogy gives us names. History gives us context. Memory gives those people back their humanity.
Somewhere between James Booker Mullins in the early American backcountry and a woman I remember with butter mints, history became family.
Gibson, Collins, and Stony Creek
The connections continue elsewhere in my tree.
My Gibson ancestry also intersects with the world surrounding Stony Creek, and Collins relatives enter the extended family through marriage. That matters because Collins and Gibson families appear prominently in research concerning the early Melungeon population.
The surviving Stony Creek church records contain members of those families years before Susanna Stallard’s dispute was recorded in 1813.
This is one reason I resist the old image of Melungeons as some mysterious people hidden away from everyone else in the mountains. The records show something much more ordinary and much more interesting.
These people belonged to churches. They married, moved, bought and worked land, argued, raised children, appeared in courtrooms, and worshipped alongside their neighbors. Some eventually moved farther into Tennessee.
They weren’t characters waiting for nineteenth-century writers to discover them. They were living their lives.
A Family Tree That Keeps Folding Back Into Itself
As my research expanded, I began recognizing another pattern. The same interconnected families kept returning.
My father’s parents both carried ancestry connected to this larger population. Following either side backward doesn’t lead neatly away from it. Instead, branches intersect with other branches.
Mullins connects to Fuller and Reed. Other branches bring in Justice, Thacker, and Blackburn. Sizemore, Gearheart, Halbert, Addington, Stallard, Akers, Ratliff, Webb, Perry, and others appear as the generations expand.
Some surnames have direct historical associations with documented Melungeon communities. Others became connected to my particular family through marriage. That distinction is important.
I don’t believe a surname should ever be used as proof that someone was Melungeon. But when generations of documented families occupy the same geographical world, repeatedly intermarry, and connect back into historically identified families, the relationships themselves become part of the story.
The more generations I uncovered, the more those relationships appeared.
Mixed Was Never the Secret
This is perhaps the biggest difference between my experience and the popular modern story of discovering Melungeon ancestry.
I didn’t need a DNA test to shock me with the revelation that my family was mixed. I already knew.
What I didn’t understand was the depth. I didn’t know all their names. I didn’t know how many branches connected. I didn’t know how early many of them were living in America.
And I didn’t understand how much history could disappear while the people themselves remained.
That last part may be the most important.
When Identity Had Consequences
Today, genealogy can feel almost recreational. We build trees, search databases, compare photographs, order DNA tests, and watch percentages appear on screens.
Our ancestors did not live in that world.
For them, racial identity could affect where someone was permitted to live, whether someone could vote, whom someone could legally marry, how neighbors treated a family, and what opportunities were available to their children.
Free people of color occupied an especially complicated place in Virginia and other Southern states. They were free, but freedom did not mean equality. Laws and social customs placed restrictions upon them, and racial classifications could carry consequences that followed families across generations.
Melungeon families encountered their own forms of discrimination. The word itself was often not something people proudly called themselves. It could be an insult, something whispered, something assigned by somebody else, or something a family might prefer their children eventually forget.
That changes how I understand some of the people I knew.
My Grandmother Polly
My grandmother Polly could become genuinely angry if someone suggested that she looked Native American.
When I was younger, that reaction was difficult to understand. Why would that make someone angry?
Genealogy has made me reconsider the question.
Today, people can proudly explore complicated ancestry from the relative safety of historical distance. Previous generations did not necessarily have that luxury. There were good reasons people learned to control what was said about a family’s ancestry, reasons identities became simplified, and reasons stories changed.
There were also reasons children sometimes weren’t told things.
Perhaps the most durable inheritance from discrimination isn’t always the label itself. Sometimes it is the instinct to avoid the label.
The explanation can disappear while the reaction remains.
More Than Three Races
Melungeons have frequently been described with the old phrase “tri-racial isolate,” usually referring to European, African, and Native American ancestry. That terminology is useful for understanding older scholarship, but human ancestry is rarely as tidy as the label suggests.
The people who eventually became associated with Melungeon communities were the products of complicated populations living in early America. European ancestry was part of that history. African ancestry was part of it. Native American ancestry appears in some lines.
Individual families have their own histories, and not every ancestral component belongs equally to every Melungeon descendant. That complexity is important.
There was never one Melungeon ancestor from whom everybody descended. There was never one moment when three neatly separated populations came together and created a new people.
There were families, and families kept marrying families.
The Mystery We Created
For generations, writers seemed unable to resist making Melungeons mysterious.
Were they Portuguese? Turkish? Lost colonists? Shipwreck survivors? Descendants of some forgotten expedition?
The theories became part of the Melungeon story, but increasingly, I find the ordinary explanation far more compelling.
These were people already living in early America whose ancestry and social identities did not fit comfortably inside the racial categories later Americans tried to impose upon them. Their descendants moved and intermarried. Some assimilated into surrounding white communities. Others continued to be identified as Melungeon or by other racial classifications. Eventually, some descendants stopped hearing the word altogether.
Nothing about that makes their history less remarkable.
Quite the opposite.
Following Them Into America’s Past
The farther I follow my family backward, the less distant early American history feels.
The eighteenth century stops being something populated entirely by famous men whose portraits hang in museums. It becomes Susan Stallard standing before a small Baptist congregation while someone records a dispute in a church book.
It becomes Gibson and Collins families moving through Virginia and toward Tennessee. It becomes Mullins families in the Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky backcountry. It becomes people whose names survive because they married, bought land, appeared in court, joined churches, had children, or irritated their neighbors badly enough that somebody wrote it down.
They were not standing outside American history. They were helping populate it, and they were doing so from places that don’t always occupy much space in the traditional telling of America’s beginnings.
What DNA Cannot Tell Me
DNA has transformed genealogy, and it can be an extraordinary tool. But there are questions DNA cannot answer.
It cannot tell me what Susanna Stallard meant when she used the word recorded as Melungins. It cannot tell me what someone whispered about another family or why Polly became angry. It cannot tell me what was intentionally forgotten.
And it certainly cannot tell me that Lena had butter mints.
Those things require something more: records, context, family stories, memory, and the willingness to admit when we simply don’t know.
That last part matters to me. There are contradictions in old genealogies. Dates don’t always agree. Birthplaces change from one family tree to another. People with identical names are easily confused. Family stories can preserve truth, but they can also change over generations.
I don’t need to fill every blank.
The history that can be documented is remarkable enough.
Reclaiming Melungeon
There is something almost circular about my relationship with the word.
In 1813, it appears in a surviving record involving my fifth great-grandmother because two women were having a disagreement: “…them Melungins.”
Whatever else was said that day has disappeared. The word remained.
Then generations passed. Families moved through Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and beyond. They married and their children married. Identities shifted. Some histories were remembered. Others weren’t.
Eventually, two descendants carrying many of these interconnected Appalachian lines became my father’s parents.
Generations after Susanna Stallard stood before that congregation, one of her descendants began following those families backward.
Me.
What I Found
I did not discover that I was Melungeon.
I discovered what that heritage contained.
I found names I hadn’t known, places I hadn’t known, and connections between families I hadn’t recognized. I discovered that people I had initially thought belonged to separate branches were part of a much older web of families.
Every time I thought I had reached the edges of it, another marriage, another surname, another county, or another record opened another path.
The roots kept going. They still do.
Perhaps that is why genealogy has changed what the word Melungeon means to me. It isn’t primarily a racial category. It isn’t a romantic mystery. It isn’t a list of approved surnames, and it isn’t a percentage in my DNA.
It is a way of describing part of the historical world my family came through.
Closing Thoughts: The People Behind the Tree
Family trees can become enormous. Eventually the screen fills with boxes, names, and dates. One generation opens into two, then four, then eight, until hundreds of people disappear into a diagram.
But those boxes were once lives.
Susan wasn’t waiting around in 1813 to become somebody’s fifth great-grandmother. Polly didn’t know one of her descendants would someday reconsider her reaction to questions about ancestry. Lena certainly didn’t know that something as simple as her butter mints would survive in someone else’s memory.
They were living in their own present.
That may be what I value most about finding them.
I already knew my family was mixed. What I didn’t know was how deep in America’s past their story went. I didn’t know how many roads would lead through the backcountry, how many familiar surnames I would encounter, or how often branches that seemed separate would eventually find one another again.
I began with a family tree.
What I found was a community.
Behind that community were not mysterious people hiding somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains. They were simply people. Complicated people. Stubborn people. People who loved and fought, moved and stayed, remembered and forgot. People who survived long enough to become somebody else’s ancestors, mine among them.
Their story isn’t valuable because every question about them can be answered. It is valuable because they were here.
And after generations in which parts of that history were misunderstood, hidden, simplified, or forgotten, I have the privilege of learning their names again.