Everything but the kitchen sink.

Sephardic Jews have lived in the state for more than 300 years,(*) (*) (*) especially in and around Charleston (*). Until about 1830, South Carolina had the largest population of Jews in North America. Many of South Carolina’s Jews have assimilated into Christian society, shrinking Judaism down to less than 1% of the total religious makeup. In addition, Roman Catholicism is growing in South Carolina due to immigration from the North.

[...much MORE]

via South Carolina: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article.

Intrigued with tracing my family lineage online, I was startled one night to stumble upon a supressed chapter of American founders, and for better or for worse, to discover the key to my lifelong struggle with a series of symptoms that had long mystified my doctors.

An amazing new history is emerging of a Mediterranean people, sometimes referred to as Melungeons, who settled American in the 1500′s long before the Northern Europeans first arrived. (The Arabic origin of the name Melungeon–”Melun-Jinn”–means one who has been abandoned by God–a cursed soul.) No, this tale does not begin with the early New Mexican settlers, but begins with a Southeastern lineage that has spread throughout the United States, and the rare and potentially decimating genetic disease traced to these colorful people.

Even more intriguing, this disease parallels some of the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS), fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis, and Diabetes. It also includes a group of other symptoms regularly ignored or misdiagnosed by physicians: acute chest pain, pleuritis, appendicitis-like attacks, arthritis–particularly of the feet, ankles, knees and hips, and the symptom for which it is named, a recurring high fever that lasts three to four days and dissipates. The name of this insidious genetic “misspelling” is Familial Meditteranean Fever (FMF). If your family story featured an ancestor called “Black Dutch,” “Black Scot,” or Cherokee, listen up.

Ironically, the story of the Melungeon people has been broken not by the US press, but by the BBC correspondent Richard Lister. He was astonished to find the streets of the Appalachian village he visited filled with Melungeon descendants who “would not look our of place on the Turkish coast with their dark olive skin ad straight black hair.”

Sir Francis Drake brought many of these Portuguese, Armenian, and Ottoman Turks to America after he freed them from the Spanish in 1587. Genetic studies now also indicate Jewish lineage in the Melungeon people as the Portuguese Jews were fleeing persecution.

I suspect Drake was relived to deliver this human cargo and avoid whatever strange malady these people suffered. In an era of mysterious plagues, a shipload of people running high fevers would have terrified any captain.

[...Much MORE]

via Home Page.

COMMON MELUNGEON SURNAMES

Adams, Adkins, Allen, Allmond, Ashworth, Barker, Barnes, Bass, Bean, Beckler, Belcher, Bedgood, Bell, Bennet, Berry, Beverly, Biggs, Blankenship, Bolen, Bolling, Bolton, Boone, Bolin/Bowlin, Boulder, Bunch, Bullion, Burton, Butler, Butters, Buxton, Byrd, Campbell, Carrico, Carter, Casteel, Caudill, Chapman, Chavis/Chavises, Clark, Cloud, Coal/Cole, Coffey,Collins/Colins, Coleman, Coles, Colley, Collier, Collins, Collinsworth, Colyer, Cooper, Corman, Counts, Cox, Coxe, Criel, Croston, Crow, Cumba/Cumbo/ Cumbow/ Curry, Custalow, Dalton, Dare, Davis, Denham, Delp, Dennis, Dial, Dooley, Dorton, Doyle,Driggers, Dula, Dye, Dyess, Ely, Epps, Evans, Fields, Freeman, French, Gallagher, Gann, Garland, Gibson/Gipson, Goen/Goings, Goodman, Gorvens, Gowan/Gowins, Graham, Greene, Gwinn, Hale, Hall, Hammon(d), Harmon, Harris, Harvie/Harvey, Hawkes, Hendricks/Hendrix, Hill, Hillman, Hogge, Holmes, Hopkins, Howe, Hyatt, Jackson, James, Johnson, Jones, Keith(e), Kennedy, Kiser, Langston, Laie, Lawson, Locklear, Lopes, Lowry, Lucas, Maddox, Maggard, Major, Male, Malone(y), Marion, Marsh, Martin, Mayle, Minard, Miner/Minor, Mizer, Moore, Morley, Moseley, Mozingo, Mullins/Melon, Nash, Nelson, Newman, Niccans, Nichols, Noel, Norris, Orr, Osborn(e), Oxendine, Page, Paine , Patterson, Perkins, Perry, Phelps, Phipps, Prinders, Polly, Powell, Powers, Pritchard, Pruitt, Ramey/Remy, Rasnick, Reaves/Reeves, Revels, Rice, Richardson, Riddle, Rivers, Roberson, Robertson, Robinson, Russell, Sammons, Sampson, Sawyer, Scott, Sexton, Shavis, Shephard/Shepherd, Short(t), Sizemore, Smiling, Smith, Stallard, Stanley, Steel, Stevens, Stewart, Strothers, Sweatt/Swett, Swindall, Tally, Tacket, Taylor, Thompson, Tipton, Tolliver, Tuppance, Turner, Vanover, Vicars/Viccars, Vickers, Ware, Watts, Weaver, White, Whited, Wilkins, Williams(on), Willis, Wilson, Wisby, Wise, Wood, Wright, Wyatt, Wynn.

[...MORE]

via Home Page.

Descendants of Rev. William Speer (1652-?) of Aryshire, Scotland

Entries: 6801 Updated: Wed Jan 10 03:15:49 2001 Contact: Ed Speer Home Page: William Speer Family

compiled 9 Jan 2001 by Wade Edward Speer 34 Clear Creek Road, Marion, NC 28752-9423

# ID: I6410

# Name: Henry Boughton Teague

# Sex: M

# Death: 1999

Father: Henry Crawford Teague b: 1882

Mother: Mary Martha Elizabeth Talitha Cumie Speer b: 1887

Marriage 1 Living Goodman

via RootsWeb’s WorldConnect Project: Descendants of Rev. William Speer (1652-?) of Aryshire, Scotland.

- – - – - -

Some of Randy Owen’s maternal ancestors.

– Cathy Abernathy

weavercat@gmail.com

Read an Excerpt

“Born Country”

How Faith, Family, and Music Brought Me Home

Chapter One
Home

Round Ole Baugh Road,
Is a great place for kids to grow
Some grow up and move away
Most of us decide to stay
Round Ole Baugh Road.
The neighborhood still looks the same
just new kids with the same old names
My Baugh Road’s in a Southern state
Yours may be anywhere, USA
Look around for your Baugh Road.

“Ole Baugh Road” by Randy Owen

My daddy’s name is Gladstone Yeuell Owen. My middle name is Yeuell, and so is my son, Heath’s. Why his parents gave him such an unusual name, I have no idea. His brothers had more familiar names like Johnny, Albert, Virgil, Riley, and Grady. Mama and some of Daddy’s close relatives always called him Gladsten, but the rest of the world just shortened it to G.Y. It made life a whole lot simpler.

via Born Country, Randy Owen, Book – Barnes & Noble.
- – - – - -
From this short excerpt I have learned quite a bit that I did not know.
Plus with little investigation on Rootsweb, I find that Randy and I are (distant) kin/cousins — via our SPEER ancestors…

I will be researching this matter further.

My initial research began when I was trying to find another couple of Randy’s relatives that he mentioned in one of his stories; when he spoke during the “One The Brink” Writer’s Conference (at Jacksonville State University, March 28, 2009).

– Cathy Ann Abernathy
weavercat@gmail.com

# Sen. Robert Smith Todd

# Given Name: Sen. Robert Smith

# Surname: Todd

# Sex: M

# Birth: 25 Feb 1791 in Lexington, Fayette Co., KY

# Death: 15 Jul 1849 in Springfield, Sangamon Co., IL (probably of cholera)

# Burial: Lexington Cemetery 1

# Occupation: Merchant, Banker

# _UID: BD26D90CBCFA44F89BBD96961AECB75C57DD

# Change Date: 31 Mar 2007 at 17:22

# Note:

FATHER OF FIRST LADY MARY TODD LINCOLN

FATHER-IN-LAW OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

KENTUCKY STATE SENATOR, 1848

Robert had 16 children, seven by his first wife Eliza Parker and nine by his second wife Betsy Humphreys. Eight of those children supported the Confederacy in the Civil War, while six children supported the Union. The Todds were a prominent family, fairly wealthy and owned slaves.

via RootsWeb’s WorldConnect Project: The Ancestry of Overmire Tifft Richardson Bradford Reed.

The original meaning of the word “Melungeon” is obscure (see Etymology below). From about the mid-19th to the late 20th centuries, it referred exclusively to one tri-racial isolate group, the descendants of the multiracial Collins, Gibson, and a few other related families of Newman’s Ridge, Vardy Valley, and other settlements in and around Hancock County, Tennessee. Some researchers limited application of the term further to the descendants of two early 19th century settlers of that area, Vardy Collins and his brother-in-law Shepherd Gibson. Recently, however, some researchers have begun to use Melungeon to mean almost all traditionally recognized tri-racial isolate groups of the Eastern United States.

[edit] Origins

[edit] A complex question

A common belief about the Melungeons of east Tennessee is that they are an indigenous people of Appalachia, existing there before the arrival of the first white settlers. But genealogists working in the late 20th century have documented, through a range of tax, court, census and other colonial, late 18th and early 19th century records, that the ancestors of the Melungeons migrated into the region from Virginia and Kentucky as did their English, Scots-Irish, Irish, Welsh, and German neighbors.[5]

The likely background to the mixed-race families later to be called “Melungeons” was the emergence in the Chesapeake Bay region in the 17th century of what historian Ira Berlin (1998) calls “Atlantic Creoles.” These were freed slaves and indentured servants of European, West African, and Native American ancestry (and not just North American, but also Caribbean, Central and South American Indian: see Forbes (1993)). Some of these “Atlantic Creoles” were culturally what today might be called “Hispanic” or “Latino”, bearing names such as “Chavez,” “Rodriguez,” and “Francisco.” Many of them intermarried with their English neighbors, adopted English surnames, and even owned slaves. Early Colonial America was very much a “melting pot” of peoples, but not all of these early multiracial families were necessarily ancestral to the later Melungeons.

via Melungeon – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia….

——————————–

Excerpt from Wikipedia…

– Cathy Abernathy