Our most recent episode, “Pre-Deliverance, Part 3” was the first time we saw over 1000 downloads within a couple of days of being released.

This growth gives the lie to a widespread belief in some quarters that there is no audience for long-format history programmes.

As the writer/producer of “Before We Were White”, I decided early on to assume that anyone interested in real history would accept that a story takes as long as it takes.

I also made a decision that even where a subject or idea required some paring-down, that this would never mean “dumbing-down”.

The biggest challenge when writing and producing a blog and podcast which tries to act as a counterweight to “fluff history”, is the fact that real history can be dark and shot-through with greed, hypocrisy, self-serving delusions, and no small measure of violence.

The challenge then becomes how to make a subject surprising, interesting, educational, and informative, without making it seem as if humanity is largely beyond redemption.

In other words, the last thing I want is for people to see one of my posts, or a new podcast episode, and think “Oh god this is gonna be depressing”.

On the other hand, if the tone taken is too light-hearted, it wouldn’t be doing justice to the often terrible things in America’s past which still have a profound impact on American society today.

Truth is like a baptism of fire – only when we’ve passed through the pain of looking ourselves squarely in the mirror can we begin to function as humbler, wiser, and perhaps happier human beings.

And with that out of the way, let me say that after food, shelter, and love – music, laughter and play are probably the most important things in life.

As I officially enter my seventh decade this week, I will be making an extra effort to remember to laugh in between fits of rage at our political leaders.

Thank you again for supporting this work.

And yes, the map above is meant to raise a smile, in between some serious head-scratching.  I thought it might be an amusing addendum to our recent podcast episode, which explored the forgotten Jewish influence on Southern Appalachian history and culture.

Make of it what you will…

 

#beforewewerewhite #hillbillyjews

 

Our total genetic inheritance is of course determined more or less equally by the genes carried and passed-down to us by our parents, and by extension, ALL of their ancestors, men and women.

Most of the DNA we inherit has been shuffled or “recombined” as it was passed-along, making us a mixture of our dad’s ancestors, and a mixture of our mother’s ancestors.

The exact mix of this autosomal DNA changes with every child born, and it is why one child might favor its mother, while another might be the spitting image of its grandfather.

A weird thing about genetics, though, is the fact that men inherit a certain part of their genes only from their direct father, and women inherit a certain part of their genes only from their direct mother.

This part of our genes is exempt from being thrown into the blender – and this small part remains largely unchanged over many generations, except for random mutations.

The genes which men inherit only from their father say very little about a man’s OVERALL genetic make-up.  They merely tell us a little bit about a man’s father, and his father’s father, and so on.

That small portion of a man’s genes which he got only from his father (and thus from his father’s father) is called “Y” DNA.

Even if a man belongs to a “Y” haplogroup which is most common in Northern Europe, we should not take this to mean the man is ethnically “Northern European”.

*****

In an American context, for example, let’s say a slaveholder named “Smith” in 1690s Virginia fathered a son by an enslaved woman.  Let’s say this mixed-ethnic son grew up, was freed in his father’s will, took the surname “Smith”, and went on to have children with a woman of African ancestry.

Let’s then say that all of their children and grandchildren also took partners mainly from the African-American community over the next 300 years.

A descendant of that early mixed-ethnic Smith alive today would most likely self-identify as “Black”.

If he took an autosomal DNA test, his results might show him to be 70% West African, 10% indigenous American, 10% European, and 10% various “other”.

10% European admixture might seem a high percentage for someone with only 1 single remote Northern European ancestor, but we must remember that almost ALL African-Americans have some European ancestry.

A “Smith” born today will usually carry a little bit of the European ancestry from ALL of his ancestors – reaching back perhaps six or seven generations.

But one thing will remain.  The Northern European DNA carried on the “Y” chromosome given to him by his father.

In fact, if this “Smith” descendant showed almost ZERO percent European admixture in an autosomal DNA test, he will still belong to the European “Y” haplogroup of his distant paternal ancestor.

*****

So what is the value of knowing our mitachrondrial (female) or “Y” (male) haplogroup, if it says so little about our overall genetic inheritance?

Besides, our genetic inheritance is often utterly unrelated to our CULTURAL inheritance, which is where true identity resides.

These haplogroups are extremely useful for understanding history, and mapping historical events such as slavery, migrations, population change, intermarriage patterns, and colonisation.

Rather than telling us what we ARE, these DNA results can tell us what we once WERE (or weren’t).

A “white” heartland American evangelical family today might have a cherished piece of family folklore, recounting how their earliest ancestor “escaped religious persecution” and “stowed away aboard a ship in Scotland and made their way to America”.

But if all of the males in the family share a predominently sub-Saharan African E-M2 haplogroup, then we can begin to doubt the family lore.

*****

The table above shows the currently known “Y” haplogroups of US presidents.

I have always been intrigued by the DNA haplogroup of Thomas Jefferson, one of the most consequential of US leaders.  Note that almost a quarter of presidential DNA remains unreported, for various reasons – we’ll talk about the Roosevelts, for example, in another upcoming blog.

The T1a1a haplogroup of his descendants is vanishingly rare in most of the British Isles.

This haplogroup is less rare in Southern Italy and the Iberian peninsula, but it is by far most common in the Middle East and East Africa.

Most online genealogies attempt to connect Thomas Jefferson with the Jeaffreson families of Suffolk, England, but there is no solid documentary evidence to back-up such assertions.

Very unlike most elite families of that time, Jefferson himself was quite taciturn about his hereditary background.

We do know that English Jeaffresons held commercial interests in the Caribbean during the 1600s. Those who listened to our recent three-part podcast “Pre-Deliverance” will have learned how England under Cromwell had reopened England and English colonies (especially in the Caribbean) to Jewish settlement.

Could Thomas Jefferson be the descendant of Sephardic Jews who “borrowed” the surname of a prominent merchant family of St. Kitts and Antigua?

His family certainly fits the profile of many colonial-era slaveholding Jewish people of South America and the Caribbean, who tended to intermix freely (i.e. sexually) with people of color, both slave and free.  Everyone by now has heard of his underage “lover” and consort Sally Hemings.

It is also interesting that Thomas Jefferson was not Christian.

Like many educated men of the time, Jefferson was drawn to the ideals of The Enlightenment, preferring that religious faith be based in rationality and reason.  The innumerable discrepancies and tales of miracles in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and other religious texts had made Jefferson sceptical of both Christianity and Judaism, and he belonged to a school of thought called “Deism”.

Yet while maintaining a distance from religious dogma, Jefferson was fully supportive of extending full rights and religious freedom to Jewish people in America.

Was he a saintly figure?  Far from it.  Was he important?  Absolutely.

And the modern science of genetics helps us to ask questions of America’s “Founding Fathers”, where previously they were believed to be of 100% nailed-on “white northern European” ancestry.

 

Americans like to keep their foundational stories simple.  The Appalachian frontier was settled by white folks – primarily the Scots-Irish, along with a decent number of Germans.

Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone are the heroic faces of this era, although neither was a hero, nor were either of them “Scots-Irish”.

But let’s leave that by the by…

Stories of these peoples’ escape from “religious oppression” and poverty further underpins a near-mythological and moral tale of survival against all odds, with white Protestant hands hewing an existence from the wilderness in the face of floods, storms, and attacks by “savages”.

But in this day and age, even the dogs in the street know that history is almost always written by the winners.  And when it comes to winning, there are few groups of people in America outside of the planter and merchant elites who won more spectacularly than the “Scots-Irish”.

Arriving mostly in Philadelphia due to regular shipping of flaxseed between there and Ulster, many of the less-well-off “Scots-Irish” found much of the land in Pennsylvania already taken by earlier immigrants, and were quick to see the potential of the fertile lowlands of the Shenandoah Valley to the southwest.

Listeners to our “Black Paddywhackery” podcasts will have learned that the term “Scots-Irish” is in and of itself a profoundly misleading term, because the many people arriving in America from Ulster were far from being a cohesive ethnic group.  People from Ulster had ethnic roots in Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Germany, Flanders, and France.  They came from different religious backgrounds.  They spoke many languages.  Their number included Jews and Romani.

While there is much to admire in the self-sufficient and doughty spirit of many of these immigrants, Presbyterians benefitted particularly from some temporal good luck, in the form of the American Revolution.

Being naturally ill-disposed to a Crown system which had squeezed them for impossibly high land rents back in Ireland (not to mention the Crown and Anglican Church’s hostility to Presbyterianism), many Ulster folk were happy to throw in their lot with the American rebels against British rule in America.

After finding themselves on the winning side of this conflict, many Ulster folk (to their consternation), found the cash-strapped nascent federal American state unable to pay their soldiers’ back wages.  And here is where the great good fortune arises.

This new American government decided to pay many of its “white” war veterans by offering highly “subsidised” land in lieu of pay.

Where did the American government get much of this land?  Why, on the Appalachian frontier, of course.  A series of extremely one-sided and contentious “land deals” with some members of the Cherokee Nation suddenly created millions of acres of cheap land with which to buy the continuing loyalty of the people who would only come to call themselves “Scots-Irish” many decades later.

And to this day, American schoolchildren picture white men in Conestoga wagons, sitting beside white women in starched bonnets, being the first to head bravely along the trails leading over the Cumberland Gap.

 

*****

 

And this is utter whitewash.

The forefathers and mothers of the Melungeons and other “Brown People of Appalachia” had been squatting and settling this region for decades prior to any influx of people from Ulster.  A complex network of post-European contact “Old Mix American” peoples including Indian traders’ and longhunters’ families, displaced Native Americans, free people of color, escaped African-American slaves, former indentured servants of Romani ethnicity, South Asian lascars, Jewish immigrants from South America and the Caribbean, and a vast rainbow of “mulatto” and Creole children arising from all of these – THESE were the earliest “modern Americans” in Appalachia.

Being a largely illiterate underclass, even poorer than the people of Ulster, has meant that their story has remained largely untold.

What is perhaps even more ridiculous, is the fact that the vast majority of Americans today honestly believe that their forebears were invariably good, honest, God-fearing, hard-working “white” people escaping “tyranny” and “religious oppression”.

You will hear people claim their forefathers fought as “patriots” in the Revolution.  You will hear how their ancestors were among the passengers on the Mayflower.

What you almost never hear, is how England used its American colonies as a dumping ground for convicts and criminals, until the American Revolution forced them to divert this insalubrious cargo to its new colonies in Australia.

Between 1718 and 1775, AT LEAST 52,000 convicts were transported to the American colonies.  That represents more than a quarter of all immigration to America during the 18th century.

A quarter.  One in a hundred Americans today claim descent from a few dozen “Pilgrims”.  Yet nary a peep is heard from the descendants of the tens of thousands of convicts, prostitutes, and criminals…

Here is a short snippet of life among the forgotten, a glimpse of the other people who were “Coming to America”. Compare some of the names below to the people you might find in your own family history.

Note: The surname “Faa” mentioned below was also commonly rendered as “Fall” or “Falls“, a name not uncommon in Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky.  The surname “Fenwick” survives today among people bearing the surnames “Penix” and “Phoenix” – it was common during the 1700s and 1800s to append a patrynomic “s” to the end of many surnames.

Thus “Cocke” might first be found varied as “Cockes“, i.e “Cox“.

Holbrook/Holbrooks.

Hendrick/Hendricks/Hendrix.  And so forth.

“Fenwick” was thus sometimes rendered “Fenwicks“, which eventually morphed into Penix/Fenix/Phoenix, et al.

 

*****

 

A Tale of Bridgend [along the Scottish borders]

“As stated, before Sir James Douglas bought Springwood Park it was named Bridgend and owned by Sir William Kerr of Greenhead. In 1714 he had arrested some gypsies who were going about armed and living off the land. He had them confined in the tollbooth at Jedburgh and refused to listen to the pleas of Janet Stewart, the mother of one of the miscreants.

“On the 25th March 1714 the household of Bridgend had retired for the night when there was an explosion which set the house on fire and the property was totally destroyed.

“On the 11th May at the Spring Circuit Court at Jedburgh, William Walker, Patrick Faa, Mabel Stirling, Mary Faa, Jean Ross, Elspeth Lindsay, Joseph Wallace, John Fenwick, Jean Yourston, Mary Robertson, Janet Wilson and Janet Stewart were accused of wilful fire-raising and of being ‘notorious Egyptians, thieves, vagabonds, sorners, masterful beggars and oppressors, or at least holden and in repute to be in such manner meant.’

“The sentences were varied but Janet Stewart was scourged by the hand of the common hangman with a scourge of cords on the bare back – receiving four stripes at the West Port, four at the cross and four at the Town Foot. She was then returned to the prison for three days and, thereafter, had her left ear nailed to a post, erected for the purpose, near the Town Cross and made to stand there for a quarter of an hour.

“Patrick Faa underwent the same punishment but also had both ears cut off. After this, they were transported to the American plantations. It is worth noting that Sir George Brisbane Douglas himself always maintained an affection for the true gypsy and Queen Esther Faa-Blythe [who] used to be a frequent visitor to his mother Mariquita.”

By Ian Abernethy, author of “The High Toun on the Hill“, a history of the village of Heiton, 1984, 1987, 64 pp.

#beforewewerewhite #history #romani #convicts

 

When “Before We Were White” was chosen as the name for this blog and podcast, it was fully intended to be provocative.

After a couple of years, though, various messages and emails have made me realise that many readers and listeners are still viewing American ethnic history through the lens of “race”, as if talking about the time before we were “white” should ALWAYS mean that so-called “white” people were once “brown” or “black” people – or at least partly so.

And because most Americans with deep roots in colonial times DO have at least some ancestry from places other than Europe, and because they can rarely pinpoint exactly where this non-European ancestry entered their family tree, it is perhaps easiest for these people to stick with the old way of categorising people according to “race”.

So even the kindest folks, people without a racist bone in their body, people ready to embrace their mixed ancestry, continue to describe themselves in “racial” terms.

They will say things like “I’m mostly white, but with some black and native ancestry”.  Sometimes they actually specify an ethnicity, but this specified ethnicity is always European, even when their “Irish” or “German” ancestry often comprises only a minority fraction of their heritage.  Igbo, Choctaw, Bakongo, Shawnee, Wolof, Lenape – all of these ethnic groups remain an amorphous blob of “Black” or “Native”.

It is true that in America, cultural genocide and racism has made it much harder to pinpoint the ethnicity of our non-European ancestors.  But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Getting rid of “racialist” thinking demands that we learn to view humans in terms of their ethnicity or culture – NOT THEIR SKIN COLOR.

Getting rid of “racialist” thinking can and should happen even when we are talking about people who got lumped together in the past under the “lucky side” of the racial caste system.

So when we talk about the time “before we were white”, we also mean the time before utterly different groups of “whitish looking people” became “whites” in a legal sense within the American caste system.

Germans, Scots, Finns, Spaniards, Jews, Swedes, Armenians, Italians, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Majorcans, Cypriots, Berbers, Welsh, Romani, and many others were subsumed into the American “race” system as “white folks”, as if “white” were an ethnicity in and of itself.

By accepting the idea of a “white race”, we end up missing an opportunity to understand the real nature of who we are, and where we really come from…

*****

 

Mountains around Hawkins County, Tennessee, about 1810

“One time as he came in home from loading, his daughter ask him to come in and see her dress which she had first pulled off. He did so and the dress seemed to light the whole room. Her dress had been sparkling for several nights. Harriet told him about it and he made light of her but when he saw it he never said a word. He first made one trip with his stock after that and took sick and died.”

(from lore passed-down by the “Surguine” family, supposed to be of mainly French origin)

*****

Here are the surnames of some other Appalachian families of French origin:

Agee (Agie)
Alley (Allée)
Amonett
Aubrey
Auxier (from German “Achser”, but present in French and German-speaking Alsace)

Barton
Belcher
Bellew (when Anglicised, from French “Ballou”; not to be confused with “Bilyeu”)
Berrong (Beron)
Binion
Blue (Ballou)
Bobo (Baubeau)
Brashear (Brassieur)
Broret
Bundren (Bondurant)

Chardavoyne (Char de Voine?)
Chasteen (Chastain)
Crockett

Dabney (d’Aubigne)
Damron (also “Dameron”)
De Busk (Deboske, de Busque?)
Debreuil (Paw-Paw French)
DeHart (de Haart, de Hardt – perhaps Dutch, Flemish, or Alsatian)
Delashmutt/Shoemate (de la Chaumette)
Demoret
DeShon (Deschamps)
DeSpain
DeZarn
Diel
Dismukes (Des Meaux?)
Dumas
DuPont (rare)
Dupree
DuPuy (Manakin)
Duvall

Farrar
Faucheraud (rare)
Ferree
Foret (Forêt)
Foure (Manakin)
Fountain (Fontaine)
Fugate (Fugett)
Fuqua (Fouquet)

Gastineau
Gautier
Gevedon (Gevaudan)
Guerin (often “Geren” in Appalachia)

Hardin (Hardouin)
Hash (Heche)
Hatcher
Hazard (Hassard)

Jordan (Jourdan)
Jouett

LaFon (LaFond)
Lambert
Lanier
LaRue
Le Grande
Lemaster (Le Maistre)
Lemay
Lovely (sometimes from “Lavallée”)
Loving (Lavigne)

Maupin
Maury
Maxey
Money (from both French “Monet” and Anglo-Gaelic “Munney”)
Mullins (sometimes from “Moulin”)

Napier
Noe

Oxshear (see “Auxier” – from German “Achser”, but present in Alsace)

Parton (Partain)
Perault (Manakin)
Pinneo

Ramey (Rémy)
Reno (Renaud)
Reynold(s) (sometimes from French “Reynaud”)
Robinette
Rongey
Runyon (Rongnion)

Sartain
Sevier (Xavier)
Shamblin (Champlain)
Sublett (Soblet)
Surguine (prob from “Séguin”)

Tackett (Tacquette)
Terror (Tirard)
Tezon (Paw-Paw French)
Trout (Trautt; perhaps Alsatian)
Tunnell (Tonnellier)
Turcotte

Via (also “Viar”)

Whisenhunt (Visinand; found among French and German Swiss)
Wingo (Vigneau)

 

#beforewewerewhite #appalachia #ethnicity