They Hid in the Mountains for 200 Years — Then a DNA Test Exposed Everything

[00:00:00]Here is a question that most Americans have never thought to ask. What happens when you don't fit into any of the boxes that your country has created for you?

[00:00:09]Not white, not black, not Native American, just something else. Something that nobody has a name for, something that an entire nation spent 200 years trying to erase.

[00:00:23]In 1784, a frontiersman named John Sevier was exploring the mountains of what is now Hancock County, Tennessee when he stumbled upon something he couldn't explain.

[00:00:35]Hidden in the mist-covered ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, he found a colony of people living in isolated cabins who looked like no one he had ever seen before.

[00:00:45]They had copper-colored skin, straight black hair, and fine European features.

[00:00:51]They spoke broken Elizabethan English, and when Sevier asked them who they were, they looked him dead in the eye and said one word, "Portuguese."

[00:01:02]Sevier didn't buy it. He wrote a report to the governor of North Carolina describing these mysterious dark-skinned people and concluded on his own that they must be Moors.

[00:01:13]But here's the thing that made this discovery so unsettling. Sevier wasn't the first outsider to find them.

[00:01:21]A few years earlier, the first English settlers had crossed those mountains, and the Melungeons were already there.

[00:01:27]Some estimates suggest they had been living in those mountains for 200 years before any English settler showed up.

[00:01:34]Nobody knew how they got there. Nobody knew where they came from, and for over two centuries, nobody could figure out what they were. Hello, wonderful people, and here is the mystery of the Melungeons, the forgotten people of Appalachia whose identity was buried for 200 years.

[00:01:53]Before we begin, make Make you smash the like button, subscribe to our channel, and click the notification bell for more amazing videos.

[00:02:03]The Melungeons settled on a narrow mountain ridge called Newman's Ridge, and in the valley below, known as Blackwater, in what is now Hancock County, Tennessee.

[00:02:13]The founding patriarch was a man named Vardeman Vardy Collins, born around 1764.

[00:02:20]He married a woman known as Spanish Peggy Gibson, whose family, according to old documents, was believed to have once been involved in piracy.

[00:02:29]Vardy and his kin obtained land grants from North Carolina and built their lives on that ridge. Alongside the Collins family were the Gibsons, the Goins, the Bunches, the Mullins, and the Moores.

[00:02:42]These founding families carved out a life in one of the most remote and unforgiving corners of America, and for a while it worked. Under Tennessee's first constitution in 1796, free men of color were allowed to vote.

[00:02:57]Melungeon men owned property, served in the military, and participated in their communities just like everyone else.

[00:03:06]Some families, like the Gibsons, even owned slaves. They weren't outcasts, they were neighbors.

[00:03:13]But that was about to change because in America, when you don't fit neatly into a racial category, sooner or later the system comes for you.

[00:03:23]In 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led a rebellion in Virginia that terrified the entire South.

[00:03:31]And in the panic that followed, southern states began rewriting their laws.

[00:03:36]By 1834, Tennessee rewrote its constitution and stripped all free persons of color of the right to vote, the right to testify in court against a white person, the right to own certain types of property, and access to white schools.

[00:03:53]Overnight, the Melungeons were reclassified.

[00:03:56]Men who had fought in the War of 1812, men who had obtained land grants and built farms and raised families on that ridge were suddenly told they were no longer citizens. In 1846, several Melungeon men in Hawkins County were actually put on trial for the crime of voting.

[00:04:16]The state's argument was simple. These men were free persons of color and therefore had no right to cast a ballot.

[00:04:24]During the trials, the Melungeons and their allies introduced what researchers now call the Portuguese defense.

[00:04:31]They argued that their ancestors had immigrated from the interior of Portugal about 150 years earlier and that they had enough white blood to vote.

[00:04:42]Some were acquitted, but the message was clear.

[00:04:45]You are not one of us.

[00:04:47]And what came next was perhaps the most absurd thing in the entire story.

[00:04:52]In Tennessee, until the 1950s and 1960s, Melungeons were simultaneously classified as three different races depending on the purpose. They were classified as black for marriage, meaning they could not legally marry a white person, white for voting, meaning they were allowed to cast a ballot, and Indian for education, meaning they were sent to separate schools.

[00:05:19]The same person, the same family, was three different races at the same time depending on which right or restriction was being applied to them.

[00:05:29]Melungeon children were not allowed in white schools, but they refused to attend black schools.

[00:05:35]So, the Tennessee Department of Education created separate Indian schools for them.

[00:05:41]White teachers refused to teach in those schools and Melungeon families would not accept black teachers.

[00:05:48]So, the only teachers they had were the few Melungeons who had learned to read at a small Presbyterian mission school in the valley below Newman's Ridge called Vardy.

[00:05:59]None of those teachers had been to high school. The result was almost total illiteracy among the Melungeon population.

[00:06:06]An entire people cut off from education, not because they didn't want it, but because the system had no place for them.

[00:06:15]To survive, the Melungeons did something remarkable. They changed who they were depending on who was asking.

[00:06:22]Census records from the 1800s show the same families recorded as white in one decade, mulatto in the next, then Portuguese, then Indian, then free person of color. Researchers call this ethnic shifting, and it was a deliberate survival strategy.

[00:06:41]Families requested to be listed as Portuguese rather than mulatto or colored because claiming Portuguese heritage meant you were European. And European meant you got to keep your land, your family, and your freedom.

[00:06:54]Other families used labels like black Dutch or black German.

[00:06:59]These coded names appear throughout historical census records, but make no mistake, this wasn't about identity, it was about staying alive.

[00:07:08]And then there was Mahala. Mahala Big Haley Mullins, born in 1824 to a Melungeon family on Newman's Ridge. She married John Mullins around 1840 and had somewhere between 18 and 19 children.

[00:07:24]When her husband became an invalid and her sons started dying violently, one shot dead on a street in Sneedville, another killed in the dooryard of the family cabin, a third hanged in Texas, Mahala turned to the only thing she could, moonshining. She made whiskey and pear brandy from her cabin high on the ridge, and everyone knew about it.

[00:07:47]The government knew, the revenue agents knew. They had a dozen warrants for her arrest.

[00:07:52]The problem was Mahala weighed somewhere between 500 and 600 lb.

[00:07:58]She suffered from elephantiasis after the birth of her last child.

[00:08:02]Officers would hike 16 miles through remote backwoods, climb the ridge, reach her cabin, and then realize they had absolutely no way to get her down the mountain.

[00:08:12]One frustrated lawman coined the phrase that would follow her for the rest of her life.

[00:08:18]She's catchable, but not fetchable.

[00:08:21]Mahala reportedly laughed at them.

[00:08:23]Tradition says her cabin sat right on the Tennessee-Virginia state line. And when revenuers came from one side, she'd move her still to the other side of the house, where they had no jurisdiction.

[00:08:36]During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers burned her first cabin because she supported the Union.

[00:08:42]She used her moonshine money to build a bigger one.

[00:08:46]She never once left Newman's Ridge, never visited a town, never saw a railroad train.

[00:08:52]When she died in 1898, her body had to be removed through a hole cut in the cabin wall. She was buried in her four-poster bed alongside her husband and sons right there on the ridge.

[00:09:05]But the worst was yet to come for the Melungeons because the early 1900s brought something more dangerous than any revenue agent. The American eugenics movement.

[00:09:17]In Virginia, a white supremacist physician named Walter Ashby Plecker ran the state's Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946.

[00:09:28]Plecker was obsessed with racial purity.

[00:09:31]He drafted Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage a crime and required every birth certificate in the state to classify the child as either white or colored. No middle ground, no Portuguese, no Indian, no Melungeon.

[00:09:51]Plecker kept lists of surnames he considered suspicious including Melungeon family names and he personally went through birth and marriage records reclassifying people without their knowledge or consent. He called it preserving racial integrity.

[00:10:07]Researchers call it paper genocide.

[00:10:10]Families responded by going underground.

[00:10:13]Some destroyed their own birth certificates, others stopped telling their children the truth about who they were.

[00:10:21]During the 1920s and 1930s, some families stayed one step ahead of census takers by moving from county to county, sometimes state to state, and changing their names.

[00:10:34]Plecker was so proud of his work that in 1935, he wrote to the director of Nazi Germany's Bureau of Human Betterment and Eugenics congratulating them on their sterilization of 600 mixed-race children and expressing regret that Virginia didn't have the authority to do the same.

[00:10:53]For generations, the Melungeons simply disappeared. Not physically, they were still there, but the identity was gone.

[00:11:00]Parents stopped talking, photographs were buried, documents were burned, children were told they were Scotch-Irish or just plain American, and they believed it. An entire people erased not by violence, but by silence.

[00:11:16]Then in the early 1990s, something happened that nobody expected. A man named N. Brent Kennedy, a PhD from the small mountain town of Wise, Virginia, developed a mysterious, life-threatening illness.

[00:11:31]Doctors at Emory University in Atlanta diagnosed it as a condition linked to populations of Mediterranean or North African descent.

[00:11:40]Kennedy was stunned. His family was supposed to be Scotch-Irish.

[00:11:45]Why would he have a disease from the Mediterranean?

[00:11:49]That question sent Kennedy on a journey that would consume his life.

[00:11:53]He discovered that his family was Melungeon.

[00:11:57]He himself carried physical markers associated with the group, including polydactyly, extra fingers, and familial Mediterranean fever.

[00:12:07]In 1994, he published a book called The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People.

[00:12:14]It was the first time many Americans had ever heard the word.

[00:12:18]The book, along with the rise of the internet, allowed scattered descendants across the country to find each other for the first time.

[00:12:26]In July 1997, Kennedy and a few organizers planned a small gathering at Clinch Valley College in Wise, Virginia. They called it first union, not reunion, because this was the first time these people had ever come together.

[00:12:42]They expected maybe 50 people. 600 showed up.

[00:12:46]One attendee, a high school teacher from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, said the words that captured the weight of the moment.

[00:12:54]These people could not have been here.

[00:12:56]Wouldn't have been allowed to be here just a few decades earlier.

[00:13:01]The word Melungeon was no longer a slur.

[00:13:04]It was a badge of honor.

[00:13:06]But there was still one question that no amount of research or reunions could answer.

[00:13:11]Who were the Melungeons really?

[00:13:13]Portuguese, Turkish, Moorish, shipwrecked sailors, lost colonists, survivors of some ancient civilization?

[00:13:23]For over 200 years, every theory had been just that, a theory.

[00:13:28]Then in 2012, a landmark DNA study was published in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy.

[00:13:35]Researchers tested Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from descendants whose families were documented in historical records from the 1800s in Hawkins and Hancock counties, Tennessee. 69 male lines and eight female lines. The results were not what anyone expected.

[00:13:55]The genetic evidence showed that the families historically called Melungeons are primarily the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.

[00:14:07]About half of the paternal lines were European and about half were African.

[00:14:12]And here was the part that shocked everyone. Every single maternal line tested was European, meaning that the founding Melungeon population most likely originated from unions between African and European indentured servants living in colonial Virginia in the 1600s and 1700s.

[00:14:32]There was no significant Native American ancestry, no Portuguese, no Turkish, no Moorish sailors, no lost colony.

[00:14:41]The exotic origin stories that had been passed down for generations, the same stories that had kept families alive through centuries of racial persecution, were exactly that.

[00:14:53]Stories.

[00:14:55]"There were a whole lot of people upset by this study," says lead researcher Roberta Estes. "They just knew they were Portuguese or Native American."

[00:15:05]And who could blame them? For 200 years, being Portuguese was the only thing standing between the Melungeons and the total loss of their rights, their land, and their identity.

[00:15:17]The Portuguese defense had saved families in courtrooms. It had kept children out of segregated schools. It had protected marriages and property.

[00:15:27]It was a lie that kept an entire people alive. And now science had come along and told them the truth they had spent two centuries running from.

[00:15:37]That the blood they carried, the blood that America had taught them to be ashamed of, was African.