PatrickMead.net

CONGRATULATIONS to the West Virginia University Mountaineers — Big East Champions!!! Love them ‘Eers! 
It’s Saturday night. Tomorrow morning I’ll preach the first two services. Josh Graves and Chris Lindsey will double team the 3rd service as Duncan drives us to the airport. Lord willing, we’ll catch our flight to Jacksonville, Florida, spend the night in [...]

There is a need to tread softly here. In my continuing series on the Hidden People we have bumped up against my family history a few times. We are, as I have found over the last twelve years, a perfect storm of Hidden People. We are also one of the most unknown of those peoples. [...]

I’ve written about the Lumbees before in my series on Hidden People. This group has a history of pushing back when necessary. Two stories are worth repeating here. The Lumbee people live mainly in coastal North Carolina though some have moved into the hills of North Carolina. They are often considered Melungeons though they, themselves, [...]

Dr. Brent Kennedy (recently lost to us and greatly missed)
wrote in his classic book “The
Melungeons: the resurrection of a proud people: the untold story of Ethnic
Cleansing in America” about some of his
relatives, the Black Nashes of Coburn County.
 
Originally thought of as Mediterranean,
Portuguese, or Indian, this family became known as the Black Nashes; a name
that got [...]

It was in the depths of the Civil War when William Blount Carter, a free person of color, came up with a daring plan. The Melungeons and other free mixed people of East Tennessee had no love for the Confederacy (see last post). Not content with small scale counter-insurgency warfare, W.B. Carter wanted to take [...]

[NOTE: more on Plecker et al later. For now, I want to start a series of two to four posts on times when the Melungeons appeared, ready for battle, to defend their way of life. These incidents are nearly forgotten now but can be found if you hunt records long enough]
The first appearance of Melungeons [...]

The ovens were going day and night in Germany’s Final Solution and American boys were dying in Europe when a letter arrived at the office of Dr. W. A Plecker, the director of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics. The date was July 7, 1943. The Bureau had been set up for one reason: enforce [...]

I made it back from the youth rally, getting in at just after 9PM last night. My back was a 9 out of 10 on the old pain-o-meter on Friday but only a 4 on Saturday. Thank you for your prayers. It had to be God’s intervention that allowed me to speak twice, visit most [...]

I’ll try to update on Sunday. I made the mistake of bending over to pick up something yesterday morning. My back — normally a good strong back — decided to seize up and I dropped like a lead turkey. The pain is interesting (I’ve seen Jesus twice. He says hi) and it can take me [...]

(chapter fifteen was just posted, for those interested in such things…) 
 
Let’s review: Mixed race peoples were free and accepted for the first eighty years of the 1600’s, but then were marginalized and shoved aside by a fearful white majority. When their rights and lands were taken, they moved into hard to reach areas; areas that [...]