"Melungeons ponder their curious heritage" (Appalachia)

[WorseBeforeBetter]

"Melungeons have been traced back more than four centuries in Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, but their unusual appearance and familial closeness often kept them apart from many of their white neighbors.

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Autosomal DNA testing, which measures mixed geographic heritage, offers a profile of Melungeons that includes Jewish, Middle Eastern, Egyptian and sometimes Gypsy ancestry. African and Native American heritage also appears.

~snip~

Melungeon historian Brent Kennedy links the arrival of the Melungeons in Appalachia to the Spanish Inquisition, when half a million Jews and Muslims were exiled from Spain and Portugal in the 16th century.

~snip~

"You don't have to go far back in the human family tree to find that all our families' ancestry came out of a fairly small region of sub-Saharan Africa," he said. "To me, the warm and fuzzy and very valid conclusion from DNA ancestral studies is that we really are all related.""

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Love the last paragraph...will be sure to share with my favorite Teabagger neighbor.