Melungeon Allele

[janRavenspirit]

Greetings all and happy New Year!!!
I am a new moderator and honored to be here.

I am Cherokee and Seneca. Results- Melungeon allele relatable to Cherokee DNA. Dr. Yates is the ONLY one doing this intensive and extensive study on actual Cherokee as you know. My Cherokee is #2, and I also have Central and South American Indian-Hmmm....

Armenian #1 at megapoplutations- most likely Cherokee. Dr. Yates explained to me of Armenians (from Armenia....) testing Cherokee @ #1- having never been in America other than Canada- no history, so why can't the reverse apply with folks like me- Melungeon allele and known Cherokee. Very interesting stuff to ponder. Have to Native American Rare Genes- specifically, Amerind and Lake Baikal.

I'm a Sizemore, Greene (Seneca and Cherokee Greenes), Jackson from Wilkes NC.

Anyone else?

[Raven]

What is the melungeon allele? I have Brazilian-Belem Amazonians at #8, u.s Cherokee admixed at #13 and also received Native American Florida in my top 50. I got the Amerind gene and the Lake Baikal gene as well.

I responded below!! sorry- getting used to the format.

[emmdee2]

Hello Jan.

I still don't have any paper trail or exact lineage. I know my mom had a grandmother part Native but totally unknown tribal affiliation.

I had Cherokee Enrolled (n=33) at #1, Native American-Florida (n=105) at #5, Native American - Lumbee (n=106) at #42 - quite a lot of Brazil matches like 5 in top 50 then other Hispanic, Ibererian, Costa Rica etc... which I am supposed to be part Portuguese.

My world matches were Iberian, Jewish, Armenian then American Indian at #4.

My Rare Genes, had 6 matches Amerind, Yellow Emperor, Rain Goddess, Europa, King Tut and Khoisan.

My mom's side of family parts from Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee but left and ended up in Iowa. So I never imagined I would match the Southeastern Indian tribes.

Been reading a lot of the books by Dr. Yates. In some ways I match for what I can see. Though I wonder if my higher score is perhaps a bit inflated and that something from dad's side (like the Portuguese) makes me match closer than I would have otherwise.

Marcia

Fascinating! It is work to figure it out....How well I know. Your Native (southeastern) goes to those very places-VA, KY, TN. Maybe NC if you do some digging. Makes total sense as even if they moved to Iowa- they started out there. Make a list of the surnames for those locations as that will be your best starting point. let me know if I can help. Here's the thing, they may have hidden their ancestry, not walked the Trail of Tears and remained on southern land passing for white. In other words, not on the infamous "rolls". But that said, you may be able to narrow the field by starting with your surnames. Florida native matches could be Seminole, Creek, etc. and with the Portuguese that makes sense.

[dpyates]

Raven Spirit remarked on her strong Armenian matches. As is well known, Cher claimed to be Armenian and Cherokee, though she later seemed to toss out the Cherokee and point to Armenian exclusively.

Here are some pictures and background on Armenians from the first chapter I am currently writing of Cherokee DNA Studies, vol. 2: More Real People Who Proved the Geneticists Wrong

jan franz.jpg (56.6 KiB) Viewed 46346 times

cher 1000.jpg (7.05 MiB) Viewed 46346 times

armenian woman cropped.jpg (9.46 MiB) Viewed 46346 times

Armenian woman, 1905-1915. Prokudin-Gorskii Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. Cher in the 1970s. Public domain. Jan Franz in 2008 at her Native American wedding, Yahoo Falls, Kentucky.

Armenians are a distinct, isolated ethno-national group that can hardly be mistaken for any other. Their homeland is a landlocked country at the geographic junction of Europe and the Levant. It is bordered by Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey. The region has acted as a crossroads for human migration from Europe and the Middle East since at least the Neolithic Period and emergence of agriculture. The Armenian people’s unique ethnic stamp was created in the Late Bronze Age and is more European in nature than Middle Eastern. It persisted for three thousand years.
In genetic terms, the isolated cluster we know as Armenian took final shape about 500 years ago when Armenia was divided between the Ottoman Turks and the Safavid Empire in Iran. During the medieval and early modern period, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire became more and more marginalized and were often attacked and enslaved. Although Christian like many other subject peoples in the Islamic state, they suffered more persecution being almost constantly in a war zone.
The Armenian Genocide of 1915 was the culmination of an official policy of eradication pursued over centuries. In the short span of a few years, Turkish authorities killed 1.5 million Armenians, leaving only 400,000 out of an estimated 2 million present on the eve of World War I. The pitiless mass executions caused an explosion of refugees fleeing Turkey. The largest Armenian settlements today are located in Russia, the United States, France, Georgia, Lebanon, Iran, Germany, Syria, Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Brazil. There are around 5 million people with full or partial Armenian ancestry situated outside of Armenia. This is more than the number of Armenians who live in their old homeland, which is split between the Republic of Armenia (formerly part of the USSR), Turkey to the west, Georgia to the north, the de facto independent Republic of Artsakh and Azerbaijan to the east, and Iran and Azerbaijan's exclave of Nakhchivan to the south.
The Armenian people are given short shrift in most historical accounts, but there is at least one book where they figure prominently. Johns Hopkins historian and MacArthur Prize recipient Philip D. Curtin in his Cross-Cultural Trade in World devotes an entire chapter to the position of Armenian merchants as carriers of goods, ideas and people between Europe and East Asia. Surprisingly, according to Curtain, the Armenian trade diaspora was more active and influential than that of Jews. The Armenian involvement encompassed both overland as well as maritime routes, reaching from China, India and the Indian Ocean to the Americas.
Armenians are united by a common language, religion (a form of Christianity) and distinct culture. Their language belongs to the Indo-European family, where it constitutes a one-language linguistic group. Experts in the past classified it with Persian, but its separate status and autonomy are now recognized. It was one of the earliest languages in the region to be written and enjoys its own distinctive alphabet with a long-flourishing literature.
The Armenian Church is a venerable one. It originated in the missions of Apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus in the first century, according to tradition. Armenia was in contact with Rome but had the good fortune to lie outside its frontiers. Partly for this reason, it looked for religious authority within and was separate doctrinally from both the Orthodox Byzantine Empire and Nestorian Christianity, the sect that spread along the trade routes between Rome and China. With the rise of Islam in the Middle East, Armenia became a Christian island in a Muslim sea. Curtin believes that the Armenians’ isolation as a separate religious community underlined the need to deal tactfully with their Muslim neighbors. Such a position probably spelled their commercial success as long-distance traders through Muslim lands.
Strategically placed, though landlocked between the Caspian, Black Sea and Mediterranean, the Armenia acted as a crossroads for trade passing from China and India to Europe and the Near East along the famous Silk Road and other caravan routes and sea lanes. Its phenomenal success was spread over three periods of empire. In the sixth through the ninth centuries BCE, the Armenian kingdom of Urartu enjoyed great prominence. As Rome rose to power in the second century BCE, the Armenian empire controlled all overland trade to and from China, belonging to the Parthian bloc rather than Roman orbit. And finally, in the tenth century CE, Armenia became again prosperous and powerful, its reach extending even to the Mediterranean. Not until it was conquered by the Seljuk Turks in 1070 did Armenia decline. Later, Armenians were confined to a small conquered area and not allowed to visit their former extended lands.
In the meantime, many important Armenian trade colonies developed in the Levant, Constantinople, the Crimea, Russia, Persia and even in cities of Europe like Bruges, Nuremburg and Lisbon. These maintained a distinct Armenianness through contact with the Armenian homeland in the Ottoman Empire. In 1620, there were no fewer than forty Armenian trade houses in Amsterdam alone.
“With the Turkish seizure of Crimea in 1475, many of the Crimean Armenians were forced to move west as refugees into Moldavia, Transylvania and mainly to Galicia, now in southern Poland. In central Europe, they made contact with other Armenian communities in closer touch with the homeland. They therefore changed their culture once more—back to norms more nearly those of contemporaneous Armenia. In spite of many vicissitudes, the Polish and other Armenian settlements in central Europe kept their position in the overland caravan trade till they were finally displaced by railroads in the nineteenth century.”
Such a conjoining of peoples squeezed out of Khazaria, together with Armenians driven eastward into Central Europe, may explain the genetic confusion of Ashkenazi Jews and Armenians first suggested by Eran Elhaik.

[dpyates]

Richard Thornton and others who have read the Arthur-Needham Expedition Report of 1673 think the people with beards and a 6 foot bell down river from the Tamahitans might have been Armenians. He has a whole post about that: https://peopleofonefire.com/from_armenia_with_love.html. Certainly, the Tamahitans are not the Cherokees, but neither is their town on the Tennessee River. More critical examination by archeologists and historians has located it near Rome, Georgia. So the "river" is the Coosa/Chattahoochie/Appalachicola system. If you read the letter carefully the people with the beard are later called "a Spanish town." So both they and the mysterious village of blacks in wooden buildings downstream are in Spanish Florida, nowhere near Melungeon territory. The Tamahitans were the Apalache.
Of course, they could still be Armenians who built themselves a separate settlement, say around Columbus, Ga. under the Spanish. The Spanish welcomed a lot of Armenian refugees. This corridor (White Trading Path between North Georgia and the Gulf Coast) was heavily Arabicized. It is shown on early maps as belonging to the Kingdom of Morocco. The peace chief/war chief custom of the Cherokees and Chickamaugans and Creeks and others who lived in this borderland was Arab. So was the custom of light horse guards or policing. Certain families like the Adairs and Waties had Arab or Muslim customs and names. The Mobilian trade language was developed by the Arab traders in America. There are more Arab inscriptions than any other in the Appalachians.
Another theory is that Armenian traders out of Amsterdam and New York are responsible for the Armenian matches. (This is currently my favorite.)
Another theory is that Armenian immigrants out of Virginia are responsible.
Another theory is that there is an accidental convergence between the Cherokee and Armenians. Both are old populations that seem to have formed in the Bronze Age in the Middle East.
Some "Cherokee" descendants have it and some do not. Neither Teresa nor I have high Armenian matches.

[emmdee2]

Nice to see you JanRavenspirit. ... I have a great aunt who when she was young looked quite a lot like the Armenian woman 3rd photo. Armenian was 3rd on my megapopulations.

Thanks! Yep....I'm still trying to figure that one out, unless the Armenian is in fact- Cherokee!

[janRavenspirit]

What is the melungeon allele? I have Brazilian-Belem Amazonians at #8, u.s Cherokee admixed at #13 and also received Native American Florida in my top 50. I got the Amerind gene and the Lake Baikal gene as well.

I do as well- Lake Baikal and Brazilian Amazonians- which could relate to Creek ancestry. Cherokee is so mixed- so different than a lot of other tribal DNA, that it would not be out of the realm of possibilities that those could all relate to Cherokee-though I would leave that to Dr. Yates!

The Melungeon allele refers to a very specific result on Locus D8S11789. "8" is the value indicating Melungeon. Dr. Yates stated that if you have that- you will most likely also have the Helen (rare gene), which I do. It is associated with Berbers, Cherokee, Armenian as well as others. In my case it is most probably related to the Cherokee. It refers to a mixed- or usually tri-racial ethnicity i.e.: Cherokee (NA), Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, European and or African.

[dpyates]

Emmdee, Are you in our Cherokee DNA Study? Please email me at [email protected] as I am reviewing the Armenian matches of Cherokees. Or just tell me what your name is and I'll look up your profile.

[christopherswink8]

I have read where Juan Pardo had “instructed” the Guatari to build structures and encampments according to the Spanish specifications. And now all remaining evidence of the Guatari is submerged beneath the Yadkin.

[christopherswink8]

Hello. My World populations #1 match was Melungeon n=40. #2 Portuguese Porto n=39. #3 Native American Lumbee n=106. #9 US Cherokee Admix n=62. #29 White Virginia n=99. #33 Portuguese Madeira n=100. #41 Armenian Gardman n=95. #44 German no n=. My family claims direct paternal line Palatine from 1739. My 7th great grandfather Michael Swink was in Rowan County North Carolina around 1740 from Pennsylvania landing of Jamaica Galley. Supposedly. He lived there until his death in 1781. I am ordering the Rare Genes test on Monday as well as the MtDna Native American report for my mother. My assigned haplogroup from ftdna is R-M269. I only have 17 ydna matches. All share my surname or a variant of it. Or are NPE’s. My ydna haplogroup from 23andme is predicted as R-Z367. Still. No direct matches along my y line. My maternal haplogroup predicted by 23andme is H1q. A rare subgroup of H1 not found anywhere other than the US. I suspect several things based on my Melungeon results as well as my haplogroup assignments from other testing companies. Conventional standards would place all of my lines in my trees coming out of Scotland, Ireland, Germany. However. I have zero y matches from other companies in Germany and only 1 y match from the British Isles. And he is an NPE as well. I can somewhat confirm the Scottish and Welsh. But nothing else. I hope that these new tests I am ordering from DNA Consultants will help shed more light on my origins.