Hawkins County Archive Project Acomplishing Great Things

The Hawkins County Courthouse, ca. 1836, is the oldest courthouse in Tennessee and is the seat of county government. It is in Rogersville.

Hawkins County, TN is considered a gateway to the West, a "jumping off point" for many families. A huge body of information existed in the court records, but needed to be archived, preserved and microfimed in order to insure that this information be available to researchers now and in the future. In 2004, an effort was made to accomplish this feat. The Hawkins
County Archive Project has since contributed greatly to historical and genealogy record preservation and microfilming.

After a series of Hawkins County Court planning meetings in 2004, Jack Goins was elected as the Hawkins County Archivist. On Dec 9, 2004, the county commissioners approved a resolution, which reads: "Whereas a group of volunteers, known as Friends of the Hawkins County Archive Project under the supervision of the Hawkins County Archivist should be authorized to prepare old records from the public offices for a Hawkins County Archive Development".

The volunteer workers then began moving the records from the court house to the old health department building furnished by the county for this purpose. On Jan 14, 2005 they began the cleaning and indexing process with 28 volunteers and two archivist from the Tennessee State Archives who worked with them for 2 days to instruct them in proper preservation techniques.

Beginning in 2006, two different couples from the LDS Family History Center began microfilming the processed records. They were Dennis and Connie Powell of Pleasant View, Utah, who after 6 months completed their 2 year mission. They had been filming the Hamilton County Court records previously. GSU replaced them with Ron and Louisa Later of Layton, Utah. and they completed the filming on August 14, 2007. 194 rolls of microfilm consisting of Criminal Court 7,033 cases; Civil Court 1795-1930 -6,156 cases; Chancery Court -6,225; County Court 5, 80 were filmed. This consisted of the court cases, plus the marriages and wills and other miscellaneous records.

Since they were not receiving any funds from the county and the acid free folders needed for many thousands of cases were 25 cents each and the archival cleaning sponges were all very expensive, a collection was taken up at an organization meeting after which Mr. Goins sought help from downtown merchants and businesses, lawyers etc. The Hawkins County Genealogy Society donated 10 tables and chairs, as the group had nothing but a bare building. They also gave the organization $5,000.00 to buy folders, boxes and a racks for the cleaned records. With the help of Brent Kennedy, Hawkins County Memorial Hospital, a division of Wellmont gave a grant for $1,000.00, a new Dell computer and laser printer. They have continued operating the archives from state grants and donations from friends

Hawkins County, Tennessee has been labeled as the gateway to the west. The original pioneer settlers came here, set up a homestead and then migrated to others counties and states. Hawkins County was very large at it's formation in 1786, consisting of Grainger, Claiborne and Hancock Counties. Grainger and Claiborne left early, the archives has several Hancock records. The illegal voting trials so important to Melungeon research were in Rogersville, although the men being tried lived in the area of Hancock County, when they were charged, so the trial continued in Hawkins County until it ended in Dec.1848.

The Archives have had visitors this year from Washington State, California,Utah, Louisiana, and Arkansas, with the log book showing over 90% of their visitors are from another county or state.

Opening to the public on August 14, 2007, the Hawkins County Archives has continued to process the records and are now through 1960, but GSU only films to 1930 and the State Archives do not have the funds at this time to complete the filming. It would be of the utmost importance if this could be done so that all this work not be in vain if something were to happen to these invaluable historical and genealogy records which have not yet been filmed.

Donations are appreciated and may be sent to:

Hawkins County Archives
951 East McKinney Ave.,Suite A.
Rogersville, Tennessee 37857


Related Post:
http://historical-melungeons.blogspot.com/2010/05/award-of-distinction-presented-to-jack.html




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Kentucky Derby, Goins, Boggs and Mint Juleps

"Thunder Over Louisville" is a sign that it is indeed Spring in Kentucky. Thunder kicks off two weeks of events/ parties that lead up to the Kentucky Derby.

It’s time to read up on the horses or if you bet the jockey (like I do), check to see who has the most wins, and if you like the color of his silks, that’s a plus. I’m sure others use a more calculated reason to bet on a horse, but this seems to work for me.

The thoroughbred industry in Kenntucky really took off during the Civil War, when horse breeders in Maryland, the Carolinas and Virginia moved their horses "west" for safety. They discovered that their horses thrived in the Bluegrass, thanks to the rich lime content of the soil, the gently rolling terrain and the favorable weather conditions.

The Thoroughbred is a breed of horse whose ancestry traces back more than 300 years to three foundation stallions -- the Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian and the Byerly Turk. Named for their respective owners -- Thomas Darley, Lord Godolphin and Captain Robert Byerly -- these stallions were imported into England from the Mediterranean Middle East around the turn of the 17th century and bred to the stronger, but less precocious, native mares. Yes thoroughbred race horses can trace their lines to three stallions, amazing if you figure how many there are now.

So what does this have to do with Melungeons?

Mary T. Brewer in her book, Rugged Trail to Appalachia, writes that Eli Boggs was living in Wise County, Virginia, and, “tradition has it that he was implicated in the murder of Alexander Goins, a man of the Melungeon people of southwest Virginia and Tennessee.” According to which side was doing the telling, Alexander Goins was either a horse thief, and worse, who deserved killing (mountain justice), or he was a respectable trader, dealing in fine horses, which he drove from Kentucky to South Carolina to sell. He supposedly lived in what is now Lawrence County KY and operated a race track and breeding farm in Louisa. He also had $9,000. with him the day he was killed, according to some of his descendants. This tragedy occurred around November 1844 at a place on a ridge of Nine Mile Spur of Black Mountain, known as Goins’ Ridge, about 300 yards northwest from where Mud Lick Creek empties into Callahan Creek. Gabriel Church, born 1814, backing Goins’ side, memorialized the event in a ballad named “Poor Goins.”

I can’t trace Alexander Goins, or Eli Boggs back as far as these thoroughbred race horses can be traced, but when Thunder Over Louisville kicks off Derby week, I think of these men. Goins, with his race track must have known Kentucky raised strong horses but I doubt if he knew it was because of lime soil. Boggs was never convicted or even indicted with the murder of Goins, but it had to have a big influence on his life, whether he did it or not.
So this year when you attend or watch the Kentucky Derby on television, and while trying to gag down a Mint Julep, tip your hat to Goins and Boggs!

Penny Ferguson, in Kentucky

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Verry Slitly Mixt, author Virginia DeMarce

"Verry Slitly Mixt": Tri-Racial Isolate Families of the Upper South--A Genelogical Study

Many thanks to Virginia DeMarce for permission to post this article.

Very slow loading but worth the wait.

View the whole article here

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TENNESSEE MELUNGEONS AND RELATED GROUPS

Virginia Easley DeMarce
Historian
Branch of Acknowledgment and Research
Bureau of Indian Affairs
1849 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20240


What is a social isolate?

The great majority of individuals in the United States who carry a mixed European, African, and Native American genealogical heritage are not members of social isolate groups. The majority of them identify with some other component of the wider society--most commonly white, sometimes Black, and sometimes Native American. As such persons trace their family history, they may find that some, though probably not all, of their ancestors were at some time part of a tri-racial isolate settlement. Therefore, the genealogical study of such groups is of interest to a wide segment of the modern American population.

The most basic and useful definition of mixed-race social isolates for the purposes of academic study was compiled in 1950 by a professional geographer. Edward T. Price wrote:

(1) The people must be racial mixtures of white and non-white groups, Indian and/or negro peoples presumably providing the latter blood in the absence of evidence to the contrary;

(2) they must have a social status differing from that accorded whites, Indians, or negroes in the area in such away as to throw them generally together in their more personal social relationships;

(3) they must exist in such numbers and concentration as to be recognized in their locality as such a group and usually to be identified by a distinguishing group name (Price 1950, 5).

Price's emphasis on the existence of a group is fundamental to studying the genealogy of social isolate groups as groups. In spite of the ongoing myth that one drop of African ancestry classified an individual or family as Black, the historical fact is that this principal was nowhere a matter of law in the United States prior to the early 20th century, whereas in most jurisdictions prior to the Civil War, free persons with less than 1/8 or 1/16 African ancestry were, for legal purposes, classified as white. While the prevalence of legal and social discrimination should not be underestimated, neither should it be overestimated. In many communities, whites were reluctant to apply law codes which had been passed to control slaves and emancipated slaves to those mixed-race families that had been free since early colonial times. Often, if one mixed-race family moved into a county or comparable jurisdiction, it was simply assimilated by the local majority population, leaving scarcely a ripple in the historical record. In order for a social isolate to develop, there had to be a large enough group to permit enough endogamous marriages to sustain a distinct population. For a general discussion of the complexities, see the well-known article by Gary B. Mills and the recent more general survey by Gary B. Nash.

What are the basic sources of information on social isolates?

Writing about social isolates has falls primarily into the categories of fact, folklore, fantasy, and even modern fiction. It is not always easy to distinguish these categories of writing. Spurred on by the wishful thinking of authors, fiction, fantasy, and folklore have masqueraded as fact with some frequency. Outright fiction is probably the least common: it can be very interesting in its own right. However, at least in the case of Appalachian writer Sharyn McCrumb's Elizabeth MacPherson mystery novel, the "common sense" historical explanation which the author adopted has no discernable basis in the genealogical documentation of the families who are known to have lived in social isolate settlements in the tri-state region of southwestern Virginia, northwestern North Carolina, and northeastern Tennessee.

Fantasy. John Sevier's letter mentioning a tribe of "white Indians" which supposedly lived in eastern Tennessee in the late 18th century has provided the root of many of the more improbable speculations on the origins of the isolate settlements. One of the most widespread resulting fantasies has been the attempt to link these settlements with early Portuguese explorations of the North American continent. The improbability of such connections is made clear by Charles M. Hudson's recent impartial survey of these explorations. Turkish origins are equally improbable.

Fact. The actual, factual, history of social isolate settlements is going to be written by genealogists and family historians: document by individual document, fact by painstaking fact. The function and duty of the historian and the genealogist is to demystify and to demythologize.

I want to particularly cite one family genealogist who, by painstaking local research, has traced the written usage of the word "Melungeon" at a date much earlier than it had been located by professional historians and anthropologists, who had made do with a recollection, written in the 1880's, that the word had been used in the late 1840's: Jack Harold Goins of Rogersville, Tennessee, located a written use of the word on September 26, 1813. Jack descends from Zephaniah Goins. Knowing that his ancestors were Primitive Baptists, Jack Goins searched first the minutes of the Blackwater Primitive Baptist Church, where Zephaniah and Elizabeth (Thompson) Goins were members. These led him to the minutes of the Stoney Creek Primitive Baptist Church at Ft. Blackmore, Washington County, Virginia (about eight miles southwest of present-day Dungannon, Virginia, in Scott County), just across the state line from Tennessee.

By carefully tracing a specific family along a specific migration route, this author has made a major contribution not only to family genealogy, but to historical and anthropological research. More research of equally high quality needs to be undertaken. When we know the origins of each individual Melungeon family, we will know the origins of the Melungeons. When we know the origins of each family in other social isolates, we will begin to understand their genesis and development.


Please do not request any further research from the author. Dr. DeMarce does NOT undertake research commissions.

Dr. DeMarce is now engaged in writing popular fiction books.

Amazon Link:

Granville Gazette:

MELUNGEON FAMILY OF THE MONTH

Notes for HEZEKIAH MINOR:

''Under the column Purebred Indian group from Blackwater are the Minors. The Minors, a fighting people, show more of the Indian than any other Indian group in Scott County. They claim to be Portuguese Indian stock. They are of large stature, tall of black complexion and very strong. I believe the Minors are of three-quarters Indian and one-quarter Portuguese. The are of the type of people whose word is their bond. In Scott County some of them own large stock farms and have prospered.'' Source: Wash Osborne



James Anderson Minor: Son of Lewis Minor & Sarah Fields, Grandson of Hezekiah Minor & Elizabeth Goins

Richard C. Minor Rosa Minor: Children of Gilford Minor & Ussley Roberts, Grandchildren of Zachariah Minor & Aggie Sizemore

Ussley Roberts Born 1841, Wife of Gilford Minor, Daughter of Emanuel and Lucy Roberts

Photos Here:

http://www.geocities.com/ourmelungeons/melfam3.html