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Curtis Christy speculated: "People whose memory of the Melungeon groups, families and individuals stretched back--directly or as handed-down memory, to the days BEFORE the ancestors stopped owning the word and the places to which it connected. And in its place, and in ANSWER to all questions about heritage, that place the old word once connected them to became a reminder ... NOT FOR THEM, but for US, of who they really were, and where they really came from."
*****
And then again ... following the fanciful notions format deemed viable by some, maybe the "glue which held them together" wasn't the alleged place name derivative "melungeon" at all; but rather a place name derivative "Goans."
As long ago as at least the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were planting trading colonies in the Goa region of the Asian Sub-Continent. They practiced the same ethnic amalgamation tactic there as they practiced elsewhere. In Goa, their mixing was aided by the presence of Ghostic Christians reputedly converted by the Apostle Thomas.
It is not a far reach to imagine Goans being transported from a Portuguese outpost in Goa to a Portuguese outpost in the Melungu region of Angola. Amalgamation between Goans and Melungu aborigine would have likely been encouraged by the Portuguese merchants and mariners as a method for converting the Africans to Christianity.
It is then not a far reach to imagine the Angolan/Goans being transported to the Western Hemisphere where some might well have continued to self identified as Goans. This imaginary pretext could easily explain the presence of Goins within so many various backcounty enclaves of fpc. Once the Irish renegades were rejected from the civil society of Pennsylvania and other more staid colonies; surnames such as Collins, Mullins, Gibson and Perkins could have quickly allied with these other Christianized settlers who were likely already in conjugal associations with Amerind renegades.
Wonder why no one has yet composed a book or two around that fanciful notion.
Lucy Suder
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