Studying my history and Knight Templars

While studying my Hale history I found out the Hales who come from Eastern Tennessee which my father was born and raised in Johnson City. It seems I have traced my history to a group called Melungeons.

After talking with my dad I realized. There was confusion between our Irish/Scottish and Cherokee heritage and it seems that the Melungeons have cleared this up.

How am I connected to the Melungeons?
http://www.melungeons.com/articles/melungeondnaproject.htm#Hale

Could the Melungeons be connected to the renegade Templar group that left La Rochelle? Who knows but the reading was very interesting.

Knight Templars are really amazing read and Ive been reading everything from LaRochelle to Sinclair and Roslyn Chapel. Defintilely some masonic symbolism and the apprentice pillar.

I also found out along the way that I was connected to Nathan Hale who was the first spy who dies for our country and was said to have founded the CIA.

The reading is good while I wait for a answer from the investigative committee.

The Mysterious Melungeons

A distinct ethnic group known as the Melungeons lived in sizable communities primarily on the upper ridges of the eastern Tennessee counties, including Hancock, Hawkins, and Rhea, in Ashe, Yancey, Surry, and Alleghany Counties in Western North Carolina, and in what are now Wise, Scott, Lee, and Dickenson Counties in southwestern Virginia.

In the 1750's, the first great waves of English and Scottish-Irish settlers entered the area, they found the best land already occupied by the Melungeons, who spoke a broken form of Elizabethan (i.e., 16th century) English and carrying English surnames as well. However, it is notable that English-speaking Indians did not understand much of their language. The non-fluent English spoken was such as could have been acquired through contact with such pioneering English settlements as that at Roanoke Island. These mysterious, apparent European people were largely blue eyed, dark-skinned, reddish-brown complexion people supposed to be of Moorish descent, who were neither Indian nor Negro, but had fine European features. The Melungeons claimed Portuguese ("Portyghee") or sometimes Spanish or Turkish. The Melungeons staunchly denied either an English or Indian heritage.

Columbus may have been the first to encounter Melungeons during his fourth voyage to the "New World." On July 31, 1502, he recorded having encountered a galley-type ship larger than his own, which was similar to galleys present in the Mediterranean at the same and earlier time periods. His son, Ferdinand, recorded that the ship was manned by forty men and women, and carried a cargo of tools, metal implements, and forges. The people wore cotton "mantelets," sleeveless shirts with an intricate design on them. In 1504, also during the fourth voyage, Columbus made a further extraordinary find. In a native settlement, he came across an iron pot and the stern post of a European ship, too heavy and distant to be that of the wrecked Santa Maria. All who saw it thought it could only have come from the Canaries, proof that at least one ship had made it across the Atlantic before Columbus.

Early English explorers had encountered the Melungeons in the Carolinas as early as the mid-1600's. One Melungeon mining community was reported in the southern Alleghenies in 1654. English explorer James Needham related how on a journey into the Tennessee Valley in 1673 he and his party encountered:

"A white people which have long beards and whiskers and weares clothing, and on some of ye other rivers lives a hairy people. Not many yeares since he Tomahittans sent twenty men laden with beavor to ye white people: they killed tenn of them and put ye other tenn in irons, two of which tenn escaped and one of them came with one of my men to my plantation. As ye will understand after a small time of rest one of my men returns with his horse, ye Appomatock Indian and twelve Tomahittans, eight men and foure women. One of these eight is hee which hath been a prisoner of ye white people .. ye prisoner relates that ye white people have a bell which is six foot over which they ring morning and evening and att that time a great number of people congregate together and talkes he knowes not what." (Samuel C. Williams, Early Travels in the Tennessee Country (Johnson City TN: The Watauga Press, 1928), 28-29.

Reportedly there was also a tradition that the congregation of Melungeon people would also bow in the direction of the bell. These scant early observations of the Melungeons provide important clues to their origin. These facts suggest a Roman Catholic-Latin origin.

The leading theory regarding the genesis of the Melungeon people, who had established widespread, well organized settlements before recognized Western European colonization of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, is that they are descendants of Mediterranean seamen who reached the Americas long before Columbus.

Some proponents of this theory claim that the Mediterranean seamen were Carthaginian or Phoenicians who may have discovered the New World some 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. The problem with this theory is that is highly unlikely that the surviving population could have maintained - for no less than 3,500 years - a separate existence, both culturally and genetically from the Native Americans. In that period of time, the Carthaginians would most likely have been either absorbed totally into, or destroyed by, the already sizable Native American tribes. It would also not explain their persistent claim to be "Portyghee," in addition to "Moors" and "Turks."

However, it would be possible for Mediterranean maritime colonists to fend off absorption for a period as short as 300 years, especially if those "Phoenician" Marines were actually part of the renegade Knights Templar fleet that had escaped from La Rochelle in 1307. The Knights Templar were particularly well equipped to organize and defend successful farming settlements in the New World, such as those that had surrounded their confiscated Preceptories in Europe. The reported religious customs of first Melungeons discovered by Europeans in the 1600's squares with their having come from a Roman-Catholic heritage, such as that of the Templar monks. Likewise the reported custom of Melungeon men having had long beards points in the direction of Templar descent. The discovery of second-century Hebrew Bar Kokhba coins around a known Melungeon settlement in Kentucky similarly supports the theory that Knights Templar, not Carthaginian or Phoenicians seamen, were the direct ancestors of the Melungeon people. Finally, the Melungeon's assertion that they were "Portyghee," "Moors," and "Turks" is striking evidence in support of a Templar identity. Many Templars were, in fact, in the later years of the Order of Eastern descent. Moreover, an assertion of Portuguese descent would be regarded as safer than admitting Templar origins, for in Portugal the Knights Templar had been reorganized as the Knights of Christ and not subjected to the same fate as their brethren in France.

Modern genetic studies have shown an undeniable link between the Melungeon people and the Mediterranean. A 1990 reanalysis of blood samples taken in 1969 from 177 Melungeon descendants concluded that the "results are consistent with the Melungeon tradition that they are Portuguese." (James L. Guthrie, "Melungeons: Comparisons of Gene Distribution to Those of Worldwide Populations," Tennessee Anthropologist 15/1 (Spring 1990). Among those populations showing no significant differences from the Melungeons were population groups in the Galician area of Spain and Portugal, the Canary Islands, Italy, North Africa, Malta, Turkey, and Cyprus. It is a telling coincidence that the majority of these locals were Knights Templar strongholds.

The great waves of English and Scotch-Irish settlers in the 1750's, ushered in a new era of discrimination against the Melungeons. Newly arriving immigrants, finding that the Melungeons were for the most part already occupying vast areas of the best farm land set about to usurp the Melungeons' land for themselves. At first the new immigrants used sheer intimidation and occasional violence. Soon they adopted more effective methods. The racial classification law was soon changed in Tennessee and North Carolina to include in the Censuses of 1790's a new classification "free persons of color" in addition to the four existing categories (White, Indian, Negro, or Mulatto) and used it to strip the Melungeons of the lands, their right to be represented in court, their right to vote, and their right to a public education. Designation as "FPC," "FC," or "mulatto" by a census taker legally disenfranchised the person; nothing could thereafter change the census takers decision, even protesting that they were of Portuguese descent.

Not all Melungeons accepted their fates quietly. The Civil War presented an opportunity for vengeance. Many Melungeon men formed bands of what came to be known as "Melungeon Marauders," and spread terror throughout East Tennessee, and to a lesser extent, Southwest Virginia. A more common coping mechanism was to avoid census takers, thereby rendering large portions of the Melungeon population officially nonexistent, while others retreated to the least desirable pinnacles of the forbidding mountain ranges of the Appalachians. Many others chose migration westward, mostly to Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and California. Others chose to migrate to Maryland and Ohio. The migrants largely tried to leave their Melungeon heritage behind them as they entered new territories free from the prejudices that drove them from their Appalachian bottomlands.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------





Main
Links