Sunday, February 12, 2012

Steven Pony Hill on Paul Hennigg and Melungeons



Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:26:16 -0800


From: jazzbaby1958@yahoo.com


Subject: Re: Scotts, Driggers, Creel, Tracey, Russell, 


Muckenfuss, etc.,etc.,etc.


To: ponyhill71@hotmail.com; BarryOneLove@aol.com

None of the people mentioned in this website was Native. Why don't you take a DNA test and settle the "mystery" once and for all? I believe from the knowledge my family has of these people that many, if not all, are connected with the families contained in Paul Heinegg's transcription online. And the Meluguen's origin has been solved by the Meluguen Project which is also online.

PONY HILL's RESPONSE:
Scott family members are taxed and appear on the U.S. census as "Indian" numerous times between the years 1780 and 1930 for numerous areas of Louisa Virginia, Halifax and Robeson North Carolina and Marlboro, SUmter and Orangeburg South Carolina. Numerous Scott family members were issued certificates in the 1860's attesting to their descent from Indian and white ancestors, specifically the Catawba tribe.

Driggers were a primary family who were apportioned large segments of the old Gingaskin Indian reservation on the Eastern shore of Virginia when the reservation was allotted out to individual tribal members (Driggers was a well documented Indian family among the Gingaskin Indian tribe from the years 1740 to 1820). Numerous other Driggers descendants were also taxed as "Indian", appear on census records as "Indian", and were issued 'certificates of Indian ancestry' as the family spread south.

The Creels and Muckenfuss (originally McInfuss) were both white men who married into the Indian-White Windham family (there are literally over 50 certificates, tax exemptions, and court cases where the Windham family was specifically mentioned as primarily Indian with a small amount of white blood)

Indieed some of these families ARE mentioned in Paul Heinegg's online publication, however Mr. Heinegg's work has been discredited within the professional genealogical societies as well as by professional Ethnologists as his presentation of the records is slanted to present a white-black theory and he leaves out, or down plays, the overwhelming amount of historical documents that identify the Indian-White element of these family histories.

"Melungean" (being specifically the Gibson, Mullins, Goins, and Collins families who lived on Newman's Ridge in Tennessee...the people for whom the 'Melungeon Project' website is focused) were identified by numerous first-hand sources in the early 1800's as being "Almost full-blooded Indian with one or two families possibly having some Portuguese line." It was only well into the late 1800's and early 1900's that the exotic ancestry stories began to pop up in southern newspapers.

Thanks for you interest in the history and ancestry of these families, and I do sincerely hope that you take the time to research the true documentation of the origins of these families





Scott Preston Collins added:


I would have added the fact that DNA cannot tell anyone what race they are or what ethnic group they came from by itself and without proper supporting evidence. The misconception that DNA haplo-grouping can make this determination is absolutly flawed, unscientific and incomplete. The DNA testing companies have really done a scam job on indoctrinating the gullable and desparate masses into believeing the lie that one YDNA test or one mtDNA test can do this on any real reliable grounds. The Melugeon DNA Project is a scam plain and simple. It was cherry picked, and is still being cherry picked, to come to flawed and eroneous conclusions based on biased unscientifically gathered data sets with no true or real factually based foundations. This same thing can be said about ANY DNA testing group or project associated with Roberta Estes, Jack Goins, any of the Melungeon groups, or any of the other Indian projects associated with any of them.

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