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I found this and thought it was quite interesting. Anyone know of any other Indian rituals that the Melungeons practiced that might help trace them back to a particular tribe?
http://www.melungeons.com/Amemel/AMINDIANbook.pdf
W. GROSVENOR POLLARD
Asked if there were any customs he thought were possibly Indian, Mr. Bell said at least the Melungeons on Newman’s Ridge built A-frame “chicken coops” about two feet high over the graves of family members. Every Memorial Day, gifts of food and water
are left in these for the souls of the departed who might not have gone on “to their reward.” My later investigation proved that this custom is a possible clue to the ancestry of the Melungeons. I knew that Cherokee territory in East Tennessee did not extend north of the French Broad River and was curious to know what Indians may have occupied land north of it before white settlement. I found the answer in John Reed Swanton’s
*Indians of the Southeastern United States*. Bulletin 137 of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, 1946.
Swanton reported that there were three bands of the Yuchi (Uchee or Euchee): a southern one centered near the present Macon, Georgia; a middle one near the present
Talladega, Alabama; and a northern one centered on Newman’s Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee. The northern band were not among the Yuchi forced to relocate in Indian Territory in the 1830s. They were settled on the Qualla Reservation with the
Eastern Cherokee band and allowed one representative on the tribal council. All deliberations were in Cherokee, which none of the Yuchi understood (understandable, since Cherokee belongs to the Iroquoian language stock and Yuchi to the Siouan one). After two years of feeling like strangers among the Cherokees, the Yuchi left and returned to Newman’s Ridge. Frank G. Speck, in his *Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians* (Anthropological Publications of the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, no. 1, 1909), both describes and includes a photograph of the spirit houses the Yuchi in north-eastern Oklahoma erect over the graves of deceased family members. They appear to be the same structures Mr. Bell called “chicken coops.” This strongly suggests that, whatever other ethnic and genetic elements make up the Melungeons, the core group may well have been the northern band of the Yuchi.
That was a right interesting post…when I first read about the “chicken coop” analogy it brought me back to the very FIRST thing I did in genealogy research…to explain: My husband and I decided to try and discover who his birth father is/was…and that led us to looking for cemetery information in Whitley, McCreary Co, KY…and we landed at a site called the McCreary County Historical Pioneer Preservation Society…a truly wonderful site! (i’ll link it at the end of this post) We began scouring one cemetery at a time looking for surname burials for STEPHENS families…and they had detailed records of well over 200 distinct cemeteries in that region…all indexed and transcribed…it was just neat to know that a group of ppl cares so much about their ancestors…and in that site we saw for the first time in our lives…the exact “chicken coops”/ grave houses that you now mention here! I do not honestly know if those structures are exclusiverly NA built…but they have some information and photos of them on the above mentioned site…they initially struck me as being “appalacian” in nature…I never before imagined that they coudl be a Native American customary structure. Another thing they mention in that site is the prevalence of white flowering plants as being used to mark gravesites in the absence of stoen markers and too, sticks with little tin “tags” at some grave locations. That said…I thought I would also make mention of a few “Melungeon” (I kinda rather dislike that term as a catch-all but know it’s general usage is apparently needed at times) customs that I, personally can relate: 1. Burying of food: it was not at all uncommon for my ancestors to bind and/or wrap various foods and bury them for the winter/season…later to retrieve it when needed…perhaps because of a lack of a proper winter storage area or simply family custom? Maybe they did it as a way of hiding it too…to keep others from taking it? Maybe it was a self-restraint measure knowing that in the winter months, food woudl become scarce?Smoked meats, potatoes and the like are examples of foods that were buried to be later retrieved.
2. Burying and generally getting RID off anything red…I simply cannot explain this but know that for whatever reason, red items were deemed as “bad”…and were gotten rid of often by simply digging a hole and burying it. The only exception I can think of to this “habit” would be the petals from the flower we called “Indian Paintbrush”… it was a quite rare thing to see one in bloom…and fetching a open flower was acceptable as a tabletop ornament however some older women of the family let it remain in nature…saying that it was beautiful and special but they personally did not disturb the plant which according to what I knew, bloomed only once of a season, typically in springtime.
3. Sweeping the ROAD….yes I said road. Be it gravel or dirt, paved or not…every single time I went to see my KY kin…some woman or other was outside sweeping the roadway…not just the stoop or porch or walkway to the house…this always struck me as weird and unneccessarilly silly. This may or may not be a custom, it may just be a family personal preference.
4. Eating and bathing habits: the men and boys always ate first and most…yet the women and children always bathed first…so I have no idea who or where the phrase “throwing the baby out with the bath water” could have come from?! Heck…I loved being the youngest girl…I always got that first dip in the family tub. Don’t know if this comes into play or not but I never in all my life EVER remember having any meal that did not have bread of some form served … be it drop biscuits, cornpone bread or table bread…maybe that is why so many ppl in the family became diabetic? Bread was always a meal mainstay.
5. Medicinal cures: there are far too many of these to list them all here but to name a few: Urine: 2 drops or warm fresh urine in each ear cured ear aches. Kerosene: was poured into lil wee dishes and placed beneath each bedpost to prevent insect infestation (yuk)…or a mixture of Kerosene and sugar was made into a goop to then be ungraciously shoved down a child’s throat to make them cough up their infection (and gag and vomit too),,,this was the “cure all ” remedy for childhood croup. Baking soda and curing salt and goats milk were made into a paste and applied to bee stings and itchy bug bites. (If it was a snake bite, some unknown to me plant leaves were also crushed up in this mixture…polk comes to mind but I cannot recall exactly). Sassafras leaves: these were used abundantly to make teas, tummy ache cures and poltices and sucking on a leave always was a treat. (I still love sassafras candy..it was mom’s favorite too).
I suppose I have rambled enough for one day…eo take care and if interested the link to the McCreary Site can be found at:
Blessings~~~~Laurie
Wow, thanks for all of the information.
You may think you are rambling on but for those of us who were raised elsewhere, away from our ancestors, this stuff is interesting.
From what I have heard, when my great-great grandparents (he was white, she was a Riddle (NA) were young and had children, my great-great grandmother was always last to eat. I don’t know why, but the kids would eat her food and tell her that she was crazy and that she had already eaten. They supposedly treated her horribly.
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