America’s first inner identity, its first distinctly “American” culture, is “Southern Appalachian”.

Before Appalachian culture came into being, America was largely a land of immigrant administrators, speculators, members of religious sects, colonists, convicts, servants, and slaves of many different cultures and ethnicities.

English, Africans (including the Gullah and so many others), Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, Romani, Greek, Minorcan, Malagasy, et al.

Were these people changed by being in America?  Sure.  But in the earliest days, they tended to live, marry, work and migrate as ethnic enclaves, religious groups, or extended family groups.

There were Scottish communities around Cape Fear and in the Carolina backcountry.  Quakers tended to settle near one another in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee and elsewhere.  German-speaking Mennonites did the same.  French communities existed in places such as Manakin Town.  Minorcans in Florida.  Welsh towns in Pennsylvania.  Jewish communities in Georgia.  Displaced indigenous groups such as the Lenape and Catawba in various locales.

Unlike the people just mentioned, folks arriving in America from Ulster in Ireland were not a single, cohesive ethnic group.  Some were Anglican.  Some were Presbyterian.  Some were Catholic.  Many were Quakers.  Some were English, some were Irish, some were Scottish, and a good few were Welsh.  Many were French, German, or Flemish.

Some of these individual groups from Ulster stuck together in America, for a while…

But Southern Appalachia changed all that.  Southern Appalachia was and is different.

“Southern Appalachian” equals “multi-ethnic”.  Period.

There is no sustainable argument for a majority “Scots-Irish” culture in Appalachia.

The music said to be “Scots-Irish” is the same music which was played throughout the British Isles by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots during the age of fiddle tunes and broadside ballads.

Feuding and fighting are not specific remnants of “Scots-Irish” culture.  Feuding is a feature of remote rural insular communities everywhere; in fact, almost none of the mountain feuds of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, or Kentucky were fought by people with roots in Ulster.

The cultural sideline most embraced as being a “Scots-Irish thing” – distilling liquor – was also practiced by mountain folks with German and French roots.  We can know this by reading contemporary letters and wills leaving stills to relatives and children.  Most everyone made booze of one kind or another from whatever was at hand.  Barley.  Corn.  Potatoes.  Apples.  Peaches.  In an age before painkillers and anesthetics, before colonisers acquired herbal knowledge of their new surroundings, alcohol was a treasured blessing (and often a social curse).

The multi-ethnic character of Appalachia is there for all to see in other historical records, for those who care to read them.

Revolutionary War Rolls.  Land bounties and land warrants.  Wills.  Census records.  Marriages.  Entries in family Bibles.  Court proceedings.  Newspaper accounts. Contracts of land and personal indenture.

In no county of the Southern Appalachian heartland – the hill and holler country of Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, western parts of Virginia and North Carolina, and southern West Virginia – in no county there, none, can the MAJORITY of people be demonstrated to be descended from Ulster folk.

Whatever Google tells you, whatever the new-fangled AI claims to “know”, those search engines and large language models will only regurgitate what has been said the most times by the most people.

The majority of people in the 1970s and 1980s thought that eggs and butter were unhealthy, and that margarine was “good”.  We now know that everyone, from “experts” down to the man in the street, was simply repeating “received wisdom”.

Received wisdom is often wrong.

 

*****

 

Someone recently asked “Why would people say they were Scots-Irish if they weren’t?  What could they hope to gain through this deception?”

Perhaps the most important thing to point-out when answering this question is that most old Southern Appalachian families have people of color in their family tree somewhere.

And this is surely why <some> Americans have been so determined to insist that “Southern Appalachian culture” equals “Scots-Irish culture”.

If America’s first non-indigenous core identity and culture could in fact be shown to be fundamentally multi-ethnic instead of “Scots-Irish” – and this CAN be shown – then one of America’s earliest, largest and richest cultural identities – “Appalachian” – can no longer be considered the sole province of “Protestant white folks”.

This would force us to change our image of the families travelling in covered wagons.  It changes our mental picture of the people in the forts and blockhouses of frontier Kentucky.  It changes the color of many women sitting at spinning wheels and looms in log cabins.  It makes us question everyone.  Tavern keepers. Keelboatmen.  Loggers.  Soldiers.  Longhunters.  And when we begin to question everyone, and we begin to see the many different ethnic groups intermixing, we begin to see a brown people.

And if you are the sort of person who believes that your culture, your “American-ness”, your “specialness” resides in your “whiteness”, this is a big problem for your entire sense of self.

 

*****

 

Always, always remember that America, perhaps more than any English-speaking nation, is full of people carrying surnames which bear no relation to their ancestry.

African-Americans carry Irish and Scottish surnames.

American Indians carry Irish and Scottish surnames.

As do people of Jewish and Romani ancestry.

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, America’s binary racial caste system forced such multi-ethnic “brown people” of Appalachia to declare themselves “white”.

This was not some personal proto-identity politics, about wanting to identify with the “ascendant race”.  This was a matter of deadly, legal seriousness.

Being declared a “mulatto” or “colored” could see any number of rights withheld.

Voting rights.  The right to attend local schools.  The right to own a gun.

Picking and going by a “white” name – often a name borrowed from a neighbor with Irish or Scottish roots – was the absolute basic first step in disguising one’s true ethnicity.

Not every family claiming a spurious “Scots-Irish” background did this for consciously racialist reasons.

Many supporters of the Royalist or “Tory” cause found their lives and farms and personal property under threat by “Patriots” during the 1770s and 1780s.  Many chose to pack-up and head for the mountains.

All things English became hugely unfashionable and undesirable in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution – a war which might arguably be better described as America’s First Civil War.

People from Ulster – especially Presbyterians already hostile to Anglican English interests – were early and avid supporters of the “Patriot” cause.

It seems pretty obvious that former Tory/Loyalist families in Southern Appalachia would not have been keen to advertise their past affiliations, nor their roots, among such neighbors.

Especially if these erstwhile Tories appeared “racially dubious”.

Given a choice between English-speaking “white” identities, many opted for “Irish” over “English”.

Remember that the term “Scots-Irish” wasn’t yet in wide usage, and certainly not among the descendants of Ulster folk.  They simply called themselves Irish or Scots.

My own great-great-grandfather Hogan – a nut-brown Melungeon – claimed to have been born in Ireland on his military service records.  He was not born in Ireland.  Nor was his father.  Nor his grandfather.  But his claimed birth in Ireland helped to deflect uncomfortable questions in a deeply, deeply racist country.

Another British and American invented ethnicity – “Anglo-Saxon” – makes no room for brown people.  But Anglo-Saxon racism always did allow for the idea of brown Irish people.  Hell, the English were positively determined to prove the “racial inferiority” of Irish people ever since they first decided to steal their country.

In other words, my brown ancestors could have never gotten away with saying they were “Anglo-Saxon”, and certainly did not want to admit to being part Indian or African.

Somewhere along the line, one side of my family became “Hogans”, and in doing so, they also became Irish, and over time, “white”.

Similar stories unfolded all over Appalachia.

There are some family lines of people named Vance, Myers and McInturff who call themselves “Scots-Irish”, when they are in fact of German descent from people surnamed “Wentz“, “Mayer” and “Meckendorf“.

For multi-ethnic Appalachians, to be “Irish” was a simple form of shorthand.

Being “Irish” was to be aligned with “whiteness”.

Being “Irish” was to be aligned with American, as opposed to English interests.

The history of Southern Appalachia during the 1700s and 1800s is one of the most richly fascinating stories imaginable.

We are doing this story a grave disservice by hiding it under a reductionist blanket of “Scots-Irishness”.

©2023 Brian Halpin

 

#beforewewerewhite #scotsirish #appalachianhistory

 

I wrote a short piece recently about the controversy surrounding the “outing” of singer-songwriter and indigenous rights activist Buffy Sainte-Marie.

This “outing” by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News (CBC) concerned the unearthing of Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate showing her to be the birth child of Italian-American Albert Santamaria and his wife Winifred Irene Kenrick.

Sainte-Marie had presented herself over many years as being the daughter of First Nations people – further claiming she had been removed from her community and merely legally adopted by the people named on the recently unearthed birth certificate.

This documentation has led to Buffy Sainte-Marie‘s claims to indigenous ancestry and identity being very publicly called into question.

*****

It must be stated at the outset that whatever the case of her biological birth, her DNA has no bearing whatsoever on her standing as a beloved and respected member of the Piapot Cree community of Canada.

The belief that “blood” determines identity is an attitude stemming directly from the history of colonialist racism pervading every level of society for over 400 years in the Americas.

But a human being’s true identity does not flow from their DNA, skin color, or some imaginary “race” category which they were assigned by racists.

Real identity comes from our actions and our lived culture.

Because we are ALL descended from one small population bottleneck of between 40 and 1000 individuals 70,000 years ago in Africa.

To believe that we are now somehow fundamentally different to one another on a biological level is to think of humans as pedigree animals, in which some of us have selectively bred so carefully as to create a “better” strain of human.

Yet we know from the science of genetics that human population groups have never managed to remain isolated long enough to develop into “races” with any meaningful differences.

I have been writing about this for years.

Why do I bother?

Because the hypocrisy of one group of people telling others “who they really are”, BASED ON BLOOD, is beyond outrageous.

The USA in particular practices this form of hypocrisy on an industrial scale.

So-called “white” people will point excitedly at people like Buffy Sainte-Marie, and label her a fraud, BECAUSE HER CULTURAL IDENTITY DOES NOT MATCH AN EXPECTED GENETIC INHERITANCE.

Yet most of the “white” people in America with no recent immigrants in their family will happily refer to themselves by ethnicity – German, Italian, Scots-Irish, etc. – while having only a small genetic component from that one specific ethnic group, and having even less cultural commonality with any such group.  Wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day won’t cut it.

Now, with that out of the way, on balance it seems clear that Sainte-Marie DID misrepresent her genetic inheritance in order to “add value” to her cultural identity.

This is of course seen as deeply dishonest by those people who claim to know exactly who they are.

The real ethnic background of many, many “white” Americans is mischaracterised almost every single day.  By the media. By their own families. By themselves.

Some don’t even know it.  Others do.

The question then becomes…why do so many self-identifying “white” people get so angry when someone rejects “whiteness” to claim a “non-white” identity?

It is surely for the people whose identity has been appropriated to feel anger and betrayal.

Is “white” anger really about honesty and authenticity?

Could it be that many Americans have fought so hard to arrive on the white mountaintop, they can scarcely believe that a fellow traveller would turn around and head straight back down?

It diminishes the value of the identity.  It’s disrespect for the ascendant gang.

*****

Colonialism is the ultimate destroyer of the link between ancestry and culture.

In order to justify themselves – the robbers of land and resources,  the exploiters of labor, must constantly reinforce a message of superiority.

Superiority of DNA (aka eugenics).

Superiority of culture.

Any people opposing the stealing of their labor, the taking of their land, must be constantly, incessantly portrayed as inferior to the colonising or enslaving group.

And once everything tangible has been taken, to ensure that the disempowered do not rise again in anger, the underclasses’ very sense of self-identity must be erased.

This combination of assaults on the enslaved and colonised has created millions of humans who float untethered and emotionally bereft in a sort of no-man’s-land, belonging nowhere and to no one.

If we do not see this, understand this, then we are either extremely lucky or a descendant of the colonising group.  Or we are simply plugging our ears and averting our eyes.

*****

I have been discussing these ideas online for years,  and as the news about Buffy Sainte-Marie broke, many discussions came to the boil.

Many of my friends online are the descendants of what I like to call “Old Mix Americans“, the people formed from the splinters of colonialism.

The disappeared people between the written lines.

We know we’re “not quite white”, but there is no place in America for people who do not claim a simple “racial” identity.

The boxes we were once invited to tick – Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Native American – have expanded somewhat in recent years, but there is still no suitable identity or ethnicity for those of us of Old Mix ancestry.

Some might say “Get over it. Just call yourself American.”

But for some people, simply saying “I’m American” is too blunt and ill-defined. “American” is a word freighted with multiple meanings – national, political, colonial.

To say “I’m American” with pride almost suggests that a person buys into the entire myth of America, wholesale.

And many of us born in the USA do not buy into “the official story”.

*****

I have a pretty serious database, built over many years, which I use to try and document “Old Mix America“.

This makes it relatively easy for me to pop in a name, and be able to place people within a geographical, historical, and demographic context.

As regards Buffy Sainte-Marie, it became obvious fairly quickly that she is part of the Old Mix story.

When addressing the ethnic background of Sainte-Marie’s parents, CBC simply states that:

“Albert’s parents were born in Italy, while Winifred’s mother and father were of mostly English ancestry”.

For a start, the CBC News story failed to make clear the existence of family correspondence (readily available online) in which Sainte-Marie’s great-grandfather Frank Atwood wrote to one of his daughters explaining his Seminole origins on his mother’s side.

Perhaps even more interesting is the birth certificate of Sainte-Marie’s Aunt Lucille, on which we find an infant girl born in 1914, clearly stated as being “colored”.

This was no small thing in 1914.  For Lucille to have been called “colored” on a birth cert in 1914 means she was clearly seen as such.

Throughout American history, if the father was white and the mother was ambiguous or dark, “brown” children would be listed as “white”, to avoid a punch in the nose.

I have quite literally thousands of records on file in which the exact same person was noted variously as “white”, “black”, “mulatto”, “Indian”, or “free person of color”, depending on the location or racism of the record-taker.

While pondering why Sainte-Marie’s aunt was recorded as a person of color, other anomalies became apparent.

Why did Sainte-Marie’s mother and aunt – Lucille Winifred Kenrick and Winifred Irene Kenrick (who were also the two siblings nearest each other in age) – why did both carry the name “Winifred”?

And before you ask, yes, they were definitely two separate people.

Of course sometimes a name might be given to more than one child as a way to honor an especially beloved friend or ancestor, yet my own research can find no other “Winifreds” in this family tree.

This got me to wondering if these girls might be TWO adopted children, with both given the name of their possibly deceased mother?  Perhaps an indigenous mother, as Sainte-Marie’s mother did mention Mi’kmaq ancestry?

While the case with Buffy Sainte-Marie’s own birth certificate is unclear, older birth certificates were able to be legally amended in the USA if a child was adopted.

AND OFTEN WITH NO RECORD OF THIS AMENDMENT.

 

Some of the Lakota I wrote about recently who were stolen and placed with “white” parents have birth certs showing the white parents as their biological parents. When these adoptions took place under the aegis of church institutions, the paperwork could be, shall we say, sketchy at times.

This issue touches me personally.

I was formally adopted aged 5 by my stepfather.  When I was legally adopted, my own birth cert was amended.

My Missouri birth cert shows me as “Robert Brian ——-“, birth son of Robert ——-, my stepfather.

AND I WOULD HAVE NEVER KNOWN MY ACTUAL BIRTH FATHER IF FAMILY MEMBERS HAD NOT INFORMED ME.

When I joined the army at 17, when I got my first passport, I had to order a notarised copy of my birth certificate.  All showed my stepfather as my biological father.

In legal and documentary terms, my original birth cert showing my true name at birth, my true ancestry, has been expunged and “disappeared”.

But onwards.

The possibility of Mi’kmaq ancestry on the maternal side of Buffy Sainte-Marie‘s family becomes even more of a possibility when we investigate further, and find her family tree reaching north into Nova Scotia, which is of course one of the heartlands of the Mi’kmaq and related Métis people.

I make sure to mention the Métis, because the Mi’kmaq of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia have been intermarrying with peoples outside their tribe or nation since at least the 1500s.

Basque, French and English fishermen, and later, colonial settlers.

During the 1780s, at least 3,500 African-Americans including slaves and Black Loyalists – formerly enslaved people from the American colonies who had fought for the British in exchange for their freedom – arrived in Nova Scotia.

Needless to say, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy were the most likely to intermix, and the Métis of Nova Scotia and Canada were a people much like the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia.

*****

All of the foregoing is not an apologia for cultural appropriation.  No one is saying that Buffy Sainte-Marie was Seminole or Mi’kmaq or even Métis based simply on her mixed ancestry.

And this is the entire point of this essay.  To be a person living 60 years ago without a cultural community to “explain” being seen as a person of color – a female person of color at that – must have been well nigh unbearable.

Were Buffy Sainte-Marie‘s mother and aunt the ones who were actually adopted?  Was anyone adopted?  Dunno.

Did Sainte-Marie’s mother have a child by a man other than her husband?  Perhaps a man of color?  Dunno.

Did a girl born into a house where she was a dark-skinned child among whiter siblings cause her to shoulder a part of her mother’s hidden back-story?  Again, dunno.

Did a woman born into a country which utterly denigrated brown and black people while elevating “whiteness” simply stumble upon a way to make being “brown” a survival advantage?  Maybe.

Put even more bluntly, who among us would have chosen in 1963 (pre-Civil Rights Act) to accept a life of discrimination over acceptance?

Who among us would have taken the time required every single living day of our existence to patiently explain to bigots that in spite of our skin color, in spite of our “mixed race” appearance, in spite of having the taint of possible illegitimacy, in spite of being a woman of color in a white man’s world, in spite of not even knowing WHY we look the way we do, in spite of ALL this, we deserve dignity and respect and a fair crack at success?

Really?  Would we take such a path?

Or would we, as a profoundly conflicted young woman with an identity crisis did, try to paper over some very complex personal and familial issues with a simple, more easily digestible (and dare I say, marketable) story?

A story which brings us love and acceptance into the bargain?

There is a difference between wrong and REALLY WRONG.

Perhaps we should all step off the treadmill of social media-induced rage, where The Left simply screams “Appropriation!” and The Right yells “Pretendian!”, and look at the life story of one girl, one woman, in holistic context.

Isn’t this the very essence of “Judge not lest ye be judged”?

As a very thoughtful First Nations elder pointed-out on TikTok this week, only Buffy Sainte-Marie knows the reasons she rejected her birth family, and why she so desperately wanted to “belong”.

The elder’s advice to Buffy?  To become a real elder herself, by speaking the truth.  Forgiveness can then follow truth.

From a less judgmental distance, the career, the inconsistencies, and the current battle over the legacy of Buffy Sainte-Marie seem really to be a weird and horribly surreal part of the larger tragedy of American racism.

The people who will suffer most from the outfall of this are of course the Cree Nation and other indigenous peoples.

Old Mix Americans, unable to belong anywhere else, will continue to be packed by others into boxes marked “black” or “white”.  Or they will choose themselves to self-identify simply as a “color”.

Multi-ethnic people having no real cultural identity with which to anchor themselves will always be nobodies or “colors”, until they choose otherwise.

And once they choose to be more than a color, let their new identity be based on truth.

Only when we reclaim our true selves are we ready to be claimed and adopted by others.

 

#BuffySainteMarie #history #racism #IdentityPolitics

 

It took this podcast two years to find its first listener in South Dakota.

South Dakota is a big state with a small population – less than a million souls, in fact – making it the fifth least densely populated state in the union.

Still, we’ve managed to find more listeners in states with even fewer inhabitants, including Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont.

It’s not all about us, though.

But still.  What’s going on up there?

South Dakotans vote conservative.  Only five out of South Dakota’s 33 governors have been members of the Democratic Party.  A rush of blood to the head once saw South Dakotans vote a Norwegian-born left-wing agrarian populist into office back in 1897, but that dissociative fugue passed quickly, and Republicans have held the top office now for nearly half a century.

Today, South Dakota is governed by a woman born with the name Kristi Lynn Arnold, more widely known by her married name, Kristi Noem.

Born in South Dakota in 1971, Ms. Noem was first elected to state office in 2007 at the age of 36, as a member of the state’s house of representatives.

Noem is a conservative with a big “C” for “Calculating”, portraying herself in whichever light will make her voters think she is “owning the libs”:

> Endorses Donald Trump?  Check.

> Endorsed by Donald Trump?  Check.

> Flags, trucks, and cowboy hats regularly used as campaign props?  Check.

> Camouflage jackets and guns on her social media?  Check.

> Well-paid positions for family members?  Check.

> Support for new oil pipelines? Over Lakota lands?  Check.

> Calls progressive senate candidates “communists”?  Check.

> Sends South Dakotan national guards to the Texas/Mexico border as a publicity stunt?  Check.

Note: The labor of undocumented immigrants (including children), underpins many South Dakotan businesses.

> Covid pandemic public health measures ignored?  Check.

Note: Covid cases quadrupled after Noem encouraged people from all over the USA to ignore the pandemic – inviting them to attend an annual motorcycle rally in the state.

 

Nearly 400,000 answered the call-out she made on Fox “news”, and this superspreader event made South Dakota a Covid hotspot.  Most of the dead were undocumented immigrants and indigenous Americans working in poor conditions in meat-packing plants.

*****

This latter point brings us to the very heart and hidden meaning of much rural conservatism, especially in the western states of the USA.

At its core, Noem-style conservatism is about a weird form of self-aggrandisement.  It’s all about proclaiming the virtue of hard-working people, people supposedly raised from the Dakota soil – a soil consecrated during its appropriation by European-American settlers/colonisers, and enjoyed by their descendants.

Truckers.  Ranchers.  Farmers.  Oil workers.  Everyone a “lift themselves up by their own bootstraps” kind of voter.

And then we do a bit of research.  We read some history.

Kristi Noem, like many Dakotans, is descended from mostly German and Scandinavian immigrants.

Her second great-grandfather (whose name she carried at birth – Arnold) was the son of Alsatian immigrants, and like so many others, arrived in Dakota Territory during the 1880s in a railway boxcar.

While the US Army was still rounding-up and killing Indians there.

There is no doubting that many of these immigrants were leaving bad conditions back in their homelands.  Unemployment and famine were especially common in Sweden and Norway during the 19th century.

Many immigrants lived in sod cabins due to a lack of timber, and Dakota soil was not easy to farm.

So hard work was certainly a given.

But one thing is never mentioned by the conservative descendants of these immigrants when they tell their story of bootstrapping.

It takes land to get started in your new life in America as a hard-working farmer.

And it’s much easier to get your hands on land when it is being given away cheap or free by the US government.

And where did the US government get this land?  Why, from the dispossessed Lakota, of course.

*****

This post hasn’t the room to recount the history of the Indian Wars in the west.  Everyone has heard of Little Big Horn and the Massacre at Wounded Knee (let’s hope they have, anyway).

But some things which are lesser-known and not widely understood need and deserve mention.

Even after the bloodshed in South Dakota was over, and indigenous peoples had been forced onto reservations, the US government and “white” settlers couldn’t leave them be.

The US government very cleverly changed the laws in relation to indigenous landholding.

Whereas most indigenous peoples viewed land as a resource to be held communally, the Dawes Act of 1887 forced indigenous Americans to subdivide and allocate set parcels of their reservation lands to INDIVIDUAL tribal members.

Once reservation lands had been parcelled-out this way, any land not allocated to a specific tribal member was deemed “surplus” by the state and federal government, and opened to non-Indian settlers.

The poorest of the poor among European immigrants tended to take-up this “surplus” reservation land, and the US government hoped in this way to dilute and break the cohesiveness of indigenous communities.

With their communities shattered in this way, the US government and religious groups then began to step in, opening Indian Boarding Schools where the now impoverished Lakota might send their children to “become white”.

Children were often not even “sent” – they were kidnapped outright, with many being placed into foster homes where they were treated for years as little more than free domestic laborers.

In some of the worst cases, children were quite literally “loaned-out” to be sexually abused.

So here we are, in 2023, with people like Kristi Noem and Donald Trump stoking their fruitcake base, a base galvanised by QAnon and tales of paedophile rings, when the real paedophiles were always right there in the open.

In the swanky apartments of rich financiers in New York, and in the Indian Boarding Schools of South Dakota.

Not under pizzerias in DC.

Meanwhile, the charming legislators of South Dakota signed “HB 1104” into law in 2010, ensuring that the victims of cultural genocide and sexual abuse are unable to hold the perpetrators to account.

This is how American conservatism buries real history, so all that remains is their self-penned stories of heroism and bootstraps.

I have no idea if I’ll still have my 5 listeners in South Dakota after this…

©Brian Halpin 2023

#history #southdakota #kristinoem #lakota

 

DNA without history tells us less than half of any story.

Many Southern Appalachians report elevated levels of “Iberian” in autosomal DNA tests.

There are a myriad of reasons this might occur, including Sephardic Jewish or Romani ancestry.

Less obvious is the possibility that some mountain folks might be part Minorcan…

I have written elsewhere about French Acadians (of what was later called Nova Scotia) adding to the ethnic mix of the Carolinas in the aftermath of their “Great Expulsion” from Canada following the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. Many of these refugees to the Carolinas were already “Creoles”, or mixed-ethnic, following a century and a half of intermarriage with the Mi’kmaq, and other tribes of eastern Canada.

For anyone with deep roots in southern Appalachia, it would no doubt come as a surprise to find some of their deepest family roots might have first grown in soil many hundreds of miles to the north.  Yet it is indisputably true.  There are people in Tennessee today sharing DNA with historical Mi’Kmaq leaders.

But what of the lands to the south of the Carolinas?  Could people from there have added to the great southern Appalachian melting-pot of colonial America?

In 1763, British military success in French Canada led indirectly to the Spanish ceding of Florida to Great Britain.  Desperate to make an economic success of her new possessions, the British Crown offered generous land grants to anyone willing to relocate to their new jurisdictions of British East Florida (capital at St. Augustine), or British West Florida (capital at Pensacola).

All right.  What does this have to do with Minorcan-Iberian ancestry?

Every schoolchild has heard of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies, but most would be surprised to learn that the largest colony ever started in the present-day USA was in fact “New Smyrna“, which was near present-day Daytona Beach, Florida.  A ruthless and ambitious Scotsman named Andrew Turnbull, with a wife from Smyrna (Smyrna was ethnically Greek in 1763, but now lies in present-day Turkey), gathered over 1,400 people from Mediterranean ports under contracts of indenture, and sailed for British East Florida.

The majority of these indentured labourers would hail from the Balearic island of Minorca, near Spain.

 

 

To make a long story short, the colony was a disaster – constantly beset with disease, supply scarcity, and unrest, due to brutality and broken promises.  When Florida was restored to Spanish rule in 1783 following Britain’s defeat at Yorktown in 1781, most Floridian Loyalists relocated to British holdings in the Caribbean.

But not all of them…

Many former Loyalists or “Tories” elected to take their chances under the returned Spanish administration.  Some built thriving businesses based on trade with the Choctaw and Creek nations.  Some intermarried with Minorcan survivors of the failed Turnbull plantation.  Traces of this curious amalgam of Spanish, English and Minorcan culture survive in St. Augustine to this day.

But what is most relevant to us, when we regard this small, but compelling episode from early American history?

It is this.  The British Proclamation of 1763 (which had prohibited settlement within Indian lands west of the Appalachians) was null and void by 1783.  An independent America had absolutely no intention of honoring British treaties – especially as many “patriots” had been “paid” for their service with promises of land in Indian Country.

With new opportunities opening up in places like Kentucky and Tennessee, many former loyal subjects of the British crown in Florida packed their bags and headed north into southern Appalachia just like many “patriots” carrying land bounties.  Many of these early Anglo and Scottish Floridians quite likely carried something of Minorcan, Italian and Greek history with them, in the form of DNA.

All of this I learned, trying to figure out why my Swaffords of Sequatchie Valley, Tennessee have ancestors who appear on a 1786 Census Roll for Mobile, in Spanish Alabama.

Good genealogy is often good history.

#BeforeWeWereWhite #FloridaHistory #AppalachianHistory #minorca