Now For Your Chickasaw Grandmother

Remember that this is a multi-page website on Irwin Family History so, please keep clicking and keep reading.

Now comes a reconstruction of the life of Hannah Combs Irwin.  Wife to John Irwin of Mercersberg, PA and Chickasaw Indian Princess who concluded her life in Jackson County Ohio.  She is the Great Great Grandmother of Patrick, Joseph, Mary, Liz and Nancy Irwin.

What follows is based upon the scholarship of Professor Barbara Alice Mann.
First of all, don't run off to the first Chickasaw reservation you can locate.  The Combs family was a founding colonial family going way back.  Hannah's Combs roots go to Tidewater Virginia and Maryland.  There were many tribes/kinship groups.  Many federated under Powhatan, father of Pocahontas.  Hannah could have been Chickasaw and/or part of the larger, ancestral Powhatan Confederation. Remember that Pocahontas was kidnapped.  Her native husband was murdered.
Their native child was turned over to her kinship group to be raised forever separated from biological mother and father.  Pocahontas was violated while imprisoned, impregnated and then shipped off to England against her will.  It is not a Disney story and native people were being enslaved by the colonists as early as 1676 and then augmented with the labor of stolen, African free people.  It was a sorrowful time for all indigenous humanity.

In Ohio and after the First Removal of the 1790's, Indians were lying as low as possible.
Resisters to the removals and land theft, hid out in plain sight.
John Irwin and Hannah Combs were married in 1825 in Adams County Ohio, adjacent to the Great Serpent Mound where Hannah had Combs (Native) relatives.  The couple had left Cincinnati, a city where Native women and African American women were kidnapped and sold into slavery routinely, until after the Civil War.  The hills of Appalachia Ohio were much safer than Hamilton County Ohio.

Sometimes, as in 1855, the government actually declared native people to be "White" so that the government had no federal obligation to provide them resettlement aid.  During this time, Hannah's relatives were being marched out to Oklahoma and resettled beginning in 1830.  It was not a good time to be indigenous, even if your were married to a European man.

Plain-sight hiding was facilitated by the light skin tones of the Eastern tribes.  The Combs family were an old colonial family and had been inter-marrying for a long time.
Federal census takers refused to record the existence of Eastern Natives from 1845 well into the 20th Century.  In West Virginia one had better have been "White" since it was against the law to own property in that state until 1964.  Passing for "White" was the only option for Natives living east of the Mississippi.  And Hannah was definitely east of the Mississippi.

Surviving Natives did not want to be "carded" by the federal government.  Enrollment on federal Native registers was not the hallmark of AUTHENTICITY but instead, the trademark of Conquest.

The Dawes Act was a game.  Its aim was to seize land bases remaining to Natives out west.  Register some Native people and leave off others, allowed the feds to sell off "surplus" Indian Territory to non-natives.

In 1888 a special law was passed declaring that Indian women who married Euro-American men (John Irwin) were no longer Native and neither were their children.  These women and their children were declared "White" with no chance of regaining their Native status.

Joseph Combs Irwin, Hannah's great-grandson and father to Patrick Burns Irwin.

MALUNGU: The African Origin of the American Melungeons

MALUNGU Part 1

INTRODUCTION

They settled in Virginia one year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. They sparked a major conflict between the Engllish Crown and American colonies one hundred and fifty years before the American Revolution. They lived free in the South nearly two hundred and forty years before the American Civil War.. Yet the African ancestors of the American Melungeons have remained elusive ghosts for the past four centuries; the missing characters in the developing saga of America's largest mixed community. Now finally, though stridently denied by some descendants and misunderstood by others, the African fathers and mothers of Melungia are beginning to emerge from the dim pages of the past to take their rightful places of honor in American history.

One misconception over Melungeon origins comes from confusion over the status of these African-Americans who, along with whites and Indians, gave birth to this mixed community. Modern scholars mistakenly assume that the African heritage of Melungeons derives from the offspring of white plantation owners and black female chattel slaves in the years 1780 to 1820. 

Wrong on two counts. In fact: 

1. The very first black ancestors of Melungeons appeared in tidewater Virginia, not in the 18th century, but in 1619. 

2. Not one single Melungeon family can be traced to a white plantation owner and his black female slave. The vast majority of the African ancestors of Melungia were freeborn for more than three hundred years. 

This bears repeating. 

Melungeons are not the offspring of white southern plantation owners and helpless black slaves. Most of the African ancestors of Melungeons were never chattel slaves. They were frequently black men freed from indentured servitude just like many white servants of the 17th century. Less often, African ancestors of the Melungeons either purchased their freedom from slavery or were freed upon the deaths of their masters. 

The black patriarchs of the Melungeons were commonly free African-American men who married white women in Virginia and other southern colonies, often before 1700. Paul Heinegg in his revealing book, "Free African Americans in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware" provides strong evidence that less than one percent of all free Africans were born of white slave-owners. 

Understanding the status of the African-American ancestors of Melungeons and the era, in which they came to America, is critical to understanding their history and the origin of the name "Melungeon". 

CARRIED AWAY IN THE NIGHT

On April 10, 1778, the following advertisement was placed in the North Carolina Gazette by Johnson Driggers, a desperate Melungeon father seeking his abducted children. 

"On Saturday night, April the 4th, broke into the house of the subscriber at the head of Green's Creek, where I had some small property under the care of Ann Driggers, a free Negro woman, two men in disguise, with marks on their faces and clubs in their hands, beat and wounded her terribly and carried away four of her children, three girls and a boy, the biggest of said girls got off in the dark and made her escape, one of the girls name is Becca, and other is Charita, the boy is named Shadrack..."

This early newspaper notice describes a common nightmare inflicted on free blacks and mixed Melungeons in the 18th and 19th centuries. The lucrative American slave market prompted man-stealers to prey on African and mixed African communities. Anyone with the slightest amount of African blood might be kidnapped in the middle of the night regardless of their free status. 

In 1834, freeborn mulatto Drury Tann of the Melungeon Tann family of North Carolina, applied for his Revolutionary War pension. In his application is an account of his childhood. 

"He, (Tann) was stolen from his parents when a small boy by persons unknown to him, who were carrying him to sell him into Slavery, and had gotten with him and other stolen property as far as the mountains on their way...his parents made a complaint to a Mr. Tanner Alford who was then a magistrate in the county of Wake State of North Carolina, to get me back from those who had stolen me and he did pursue the rogues and overtook them at the mountains and took me from them." 

On March 12, 1754 John Scott, a "free Negro" of Berkely County, South Carolina filed an affidavit notifying authorities in Orange County, North Carolina that: 

"Joseph Deevit, Wm. Deevit, and Zachariah Martin entered by force the house of his daughter, Amy Hawley, and carried her off by force with her six children, and he thinks they are taking them north to sell as slaves." 

These three cases among many illustrate how that by 1750, free blacks, mulattos and mixed Melungeons lived in constant danger of illegal abduction and loss of liberty during the long night of American slavery. A single drop of African blood could land a free Melungeon in court, fighting false charges that he or she was a runaway slave. Travel abroad was even riskier than remaining in their vulnerable communities. Melungeons quickly learned to move in large groups from county to county to escape opportunistic man-stealers. 

The issue of African blood in Melungeons was troublesome as early as the first recorded appearance of the name "Melungeon". The word was used in the September 26th, 1813 minutes of the Stoney Creek church of Virginia. Sister Susanna Kitchen brought a complaint to the church against Sister Susanna "Sookie" Stallard for "harboring them Melungins." Stoney Creek had a membership, which included whites, free Negroes, slaves and Melungeons. Each group was segregated within the church and the color bar was strictly enforced. 

White church members in Virginia knew Melungeons were part African. Even by 1813, the issue of an African heritage in Melungeons was viewed differently in different regions. The younger southern states had a tradition in the early 1800s that Melungeons were not African but Mediterranean or South Seas people. For example: William Goyens was born in North Carolina in 1794 to a "free Negro" father and a white mother. In 1821, he came to Texas and became a prosperous millionaire businessman in Nacogdoches. In 1832, he proposed marriage to a white woman named Polly Sibley. Her brothers came from Georgia to block the marriage, but consented when they heard that William Goyens was not African, but "Melungeon". 

However, the original tidewater colonies like Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the Carolinas knew otherwise. Virginia grandfathers from the colonial era could remember the Negro ancestors of the Melungeons even though the issue of black and white marriage had never scandalized them as it did their grandchildren. For the Stoney Creek church, the possibility of sexual attraction between the children of white members and the children of Melungeon members represented a danger. When Stoney Creek's Melungeons members began to move away into Kyle's Ford, Tennessee, the white church members of Virginia breathed a sigh of relief. 

From time to time, these Melungeons would return to visit Stoney Creek, a 40-mile trip that required a one-night stopover. Sister "Sookie" came under suspicion from other white church members for allegedly "harboring them Melungeons" overnight. 

In the Stoney Creek case in the early 1800s, the presence of just a little African blood in Melungeons raised tensions because Melungeons were otherwise white. Blacks, free and slave were welcome to worship with whites at the Stoney Creek church. Melungeons were not. 

However, this was not always the case in the history of Virginia. Once upon an earlier time in America, mixed Melungeons and indeed many full-blooded Africans, were strangers to prejudice. 

THREE MAJOR ETHNIC ANCESTORS OF MELUNGEONS

Melungeons are an ethnically diverse group originating in early 1600s Virginia, Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware. Their descendants' later spread into Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, and Texas. The earliest Melungeon ancestors were white northern Europeans, Bantu Africans and North American Indians. 

Among the northern Europeans, the Melungeon ancestors include English, Scot, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, and German parents. North American Indian ancestors include people from the tribes of Powhatan, Mattaponi, Monie, Nansemond, Rappahanock, Pamunkey, Chickahominie, Cherokee (Buffalo Ridge) and Choctaw. 

From the 1620s, in southern British colonies like Virginia, white northern Europeans intermarried with Indians. They also intermarried with Africans who began entering the American colonies as early as 1619. Melungeons originate from these red, white and black peoples in this period of American history. They began forming identifiable separate mixed communities when the first anti-African laws started restricting some of their freedoms by 1660. 

Until recently, not much has been known about the Melungeons' African ancestors. New evidence now indicates that the black ancestors of Melungeons were peoples of Kimbundu and Kikongo-speaking Angola and historic Kongo along Africa's lower west coast. The nation of Mbundu in Angola yielded more black ancestors for Melungeons than any other African people. 

European conquest of interior Angola began when Portugal attacked the Mbundu kingdom of Ndongo in the modern Malange district of Angola in a military campaign lasting from 1618-1620. At the time, England and its American colonies had no direct trade in African slaves. Nevertheless, during Portugal's war on Ndongo, Africans began appearing in British Virginia aboard Dutch and English privateers, which specialized in robbing Portuguese merchant-slavers leaving the Angolan port of Luanda. 

THE KIMBUNDU-ANGOLAN ORIGIN OF THE NAME "MELUNGEON"

The Stoney Creek mention of "Melungeons" reveals the name was a common word familiar to Virginians at least as early as the beginning of the 19th century. Free Melungeons of mixed red, white and black ancestry originated within one generation of the first Angolans who arrived in Virginia in 1619 and who continued coming to the southern tidewater colonies through 1720. These early Africans were Kimbundu-speaking Angolans who, like Angolans in Brazil, described themselves as "malungu". Within a decade of arriving in Virginia, after serving about 7-10 years of indentured servitude, these Angolan ancestors of the Melungeons were free to move from county to county. They were free as early as 1640 to own property and to name their community in their native Kimbundu language. 

The name "Melungeon" was not applied to these first Africans by white outsiders or slave owners. It was a name they called themselves. Stoney Creek church records show the name "Melungeon" began in Virginia and not in Tennessee. As we shall see, mixed Melungeons existed in Virginia by 1680 when their Angolan fathers were still speaking Kimbundu as well as English. The origin of the name "Melungeon"in Virginia and not Tennesseee, and the presence of Kimbundu-speaking Angolans in Virginia by 1680 strongly support a Kimbundu African etymology for the name "Melungeon". 

The name "Melungeon" comes directly from the Kimbundu-Angolan word malungu, which originally meant "watercraft". Kimbundu was the language of the Mbundu nation, which included the Ndongo kingdom. The first Africans coming to Virginia in 1619 and for many years afterward were Mbundu. This Kimbundu word came to mean "shipmates from a common country" among Mbundu people in America. John Thornton of Millersville University of Pennsylvania, and Linda Heywood of Howard University have found evidence of the name elsewhere. 

"In Brazil, which had a heavily Kimbundu-speaking African population, the term malungu was used to mean anyone who had traveled on the same ship together, and gradually extended (by definition) to other close companions or friends. Since the word derives from Kimbundu (the same word is also used in Kikongo) and not Portuguese, there is no reason that it can't also be used in areas outside Brazil where the Angolans went."

The Mbundu in Virginia, as in Brazil, used "malungu" to describe their fellow Countrymen shipped west to the New World across the Atlantic. Professor Robert Slene wrote an article entitled, "Malunga, ngoma vem! Africa encoberta e descoberta no Brasil" [Malungu, ngoma comes! Africa uncovered and discovered in Brazil]. Slene notes that in Brazil the word was borrowed into Portuguese as "melungo" (shipmate) from the Kimbundu and Kikongo languages. He cites the philologist Macedo Soares as giving a definition of "malungo"in 1880 (in Portuguese): 

"'companheiro, patricio, da mesma regiao, que veio no mesmo comboio" parceiro da mesma laia, camarada, parente.' (translated: companion, fellow countryman, from the same region, who travels on the same conveyance, from the same background, comrade, relative). Soares cites a 1779 Portuguese dictionary with the example, 'Malungo, meu malungo...chama o preto a outro cativo que veio com ele na mesma embaracao,' which is translated 'Malungo, my malungo'...the black calls another captive who came with him on the same ship."

Slene finds the etymology of the later Portuguese word melungo in the earlier Angolan malungu from the languages of Kimbundu, Kikongo, and Umbundu (spoken in central Angola). In the modern languages, the definition of malungu can mean "companion". Thornton and Heywood write: "...the idea that the term means "shipmate" and could be extended to "countryman" or "close friend" and "relative" makes great sense to us and gives the term "Melungeon" great significance." 

The American name "Melungeon" is an English elongation of the Kimbundu malungu, used by newly arrived Angolans in colonial Virginia to describe themselves; companions, shipmates, fellow passengers from a common homeland who had endured the great Atlantic crossing together. 17th century Kimbundu-speaking Mbundu people in America took anglicized surnames, which are still found among Melungeons today. 

Scenarios for a French, or Portuguese origin for the name "Melungeon" are highly speculative. Angolans, who were without question among the ancestors of American Melungeons, called themselves "malungu" at the same time Melungeons originated in 17th century Virginia. At this time in history, French adventurers and traders were regarded as spies and barred from Virginia. The French "malange" meaning "mixed" is an unlikely source of the name "Melungeon". Only the vaguest of scenarios have been proposed to explain the French "malange" theory, and even those have been outside of historical context. 

There is only a remote possibility that these Angolans called themselves after the Portuguese "melungo" since we have no evidence of the Kimbundu word being adapted into Portuguese as early as the 17th century. The word "Melungeon" did not derive from the Portuguese "melungo". Rather, both the English "Melungeon" and the Portuguese "melungo" came directly from the Kimbundu "malungu".