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Well, Joanne, given your acrimonious history with Tim--and to a lesser degree with me--all I can say is that I'm glad that your pronouncement of an edict doesn't carry the force of "law."
Although I agree with (or you have convinced me, more or less) with many of the things I started out resisting from you--mostly because of HOW you present things (... meaning like a boxer), I think that your judgment is clouded with bias and association with some who--for whatever reason--take a very different approach to the documentation than Tim does. But the fact that YOU disagree with Tim STILL does not make Tim's well-documented findings a "theory," when the building blocks were factual and not speculative to the degree that would push them over into the realm of the imagination.
I mean, your whole thing about the first WRITTEN use of the term "Melungeon" (or something similar) being around the area of Newman's Ridge led you into the "Ridge-Only Heresy" only a few years ago. The fatal flaw in your reasoning had to do with the fact that you couldn't account for ANY verbal utterances of the term because, of course, they weren't recorded on paper but said! So you made the error in logic of assuming that there was something magical about the writing down of the term, as if that somehow moved it from fantasy to reality when, of course, that was far from the case. After all, the word would HAVE TO HAVE been coined (and well used to develop a meaning that a writer knew others would understand). That the illiterate bands of Melungeons moving into the mountains brought the word with them, I have no doubt. Nor would your or anyone else if you really thought about it. And you have NO way to prove that is not what happened. Whereas Tim's research that uncovered the once-thought Dutch ship to have, in fact, been an English ship, captain, and crew, flying under a Dutch ship because of new alliances and a ban on free-booting, etc., etc. ... and the capture of the Portuguese slave ship from .... where? the Portuguese colony of Angola, where the Portuguese were busy removing a certain tribe from a place called the "Melunge" ... and so on ... make your conclusion startlingly absurd--as if our ancestors days in the darkness of illiteracy meant that their lives stood for nothing, and nothing they knew, did or said mattered until some hater in some intolerant primative Baptist church wrote it down!
Anyway, Joanne, these things will all sort themselves out--some by people who accept your version (theory) of things, I'm sure, and some by people who accept the Documentation that Tim has amassed as adequate evidence to call it all FACT. Until you onvince me otherwise, I remain in the latter camp.
Curtis friend9
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