Black Dutch (genealogy)

Black Dutch is a term with several different meanings in United States dialect and slang. It generally refers to racial, ethnic, or cultural roots, but its meaning is different in different parts of the nation. A few different groups of people have used the term "Black Dutch," often as ancestral reference.

Black Sock Dutch is an American ethnic designation no longer used officially but often found in the lore passed down in certain families of mixed ancestry, especially those of Cherokee descent. In common usage, it does not imply African admixture, although some families that use the term are of tri-racial descent.

Melungeons, Mestees, and Jews

Sometimes Mestees such as Melungeons have identified themselves as "Black Dutch" to facilitate acceptance as white. The term first appears in U.S. history as a reference to Hollanders of dark appearance. According to Mary Bondurant Warren, editor of Family Puzzlers and one-time Historian of the state of Georgia, the term Black Dutch designated the (usually illegitimate) product of swarthy Iberian soldiers and local fair-skinned Netherlands women during the Spanish occupation of the Low Lands in the sixteenth century. The same people were often called Portuguese in colonial Virginia and Carolina records. A connection between the two lies in the Sephardic Jewish, or Marrano, merchants who settled in the Dutch Republic following its independence from Spain, who called themselves, ambiguously, gente del linaje, or homens da nação, or “Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation." They streamed into Britain, and thence to America, beginning with the mission of Amsterdam chief rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel to readmit Jews to England under Oliver Cromwell.

The first known use of the word Melungeon in U.S. records (“Melungin”) occurs in the minutes of the Primitive Baptist Church of Stony Creek, Tennessee, in 1813, where it is applied to certain “irregular” members with the surnames Minor, Gibson, and Collins who fraternized with the neighbors like the Sizemores (Cismar), a mixed Portuguese, Jewish, and American Indian family, on Blackwater Creek. Mere knowledge of such a rare term is striking, and its meaning has been hotly debated. Many years later, these and other families who clustered around Newmans Ridge were labeled as Melungeon by a Nashville journalist named Drumgoole (in 1890), and the term has stuck.

Drumgoole was a descendant of Alexander Drumgoole (d. 1837), a Scots trader among the Cherokee, whose mixed-blood daughter Nannie the Pain married Cherokee chief Doublehead (d. Aug. 9, 1807). She is credited with popularizing many elements of the Melungeon legend at a time when her cohorts among New York travel writers were inventing “hillbillies.”

The term Melungeon is also used in Brazilian history to refer to settlements by Portuguese Jews and Moorish adventurers among Amerindians of the Wild Coast in South America, which contained some of the first Jewish colonies in the New World -- again, the Sephardic element. The great bulk of Brazil’s African slaves came from Angola and spoke the Angolan language called Malungin.

Swarthy Germans

English speaking colonists were unable to pronounce the word “Deutsche” (Germans) and the word “Deutsche” became “Dutch.” For example, “Pennsylvania Dutch” (more strictly, Pennsylvania Germans) are the descendants of German immigrants who came to Pennsylvania prior to 1800. However, the term acquired a wider meaning and, according to researcher James Pylant, based on his extensive survey of American families claiming "Black Dutch" as part of their heritage:

"There are strong indications that the original "Black Dutch" were swarthy complexioned Germans. Anglo-Americans loosely applied the term to any dark-complexioned American of European descent. The term was adopted as an attempt to disguise Indian or infrequently, tri-racial descent. By the mid-1800s the term had become an American colloquialism; a derogative term for anything denoting one's small stature, dark coloring, working-class status, political sentiments, or anyone of foreign extract."

He also writes:

"In contrast to the Anglo-surnamed Melungeons, nearly 60% of American families reporting Black Dutch tradition bear surnames that are either decidely German or possibly Americanized from Germanic origin."

Native Americans "passing" for white

Tah-Chee (Dutch), A Cherokee Chief, 1837, Smithsonian American Art Museum; image from McKenney and Hall's "Indian Tribes of North America": with lithographer Albert Newsam's signature; based on a painting by Charles Bird King

Historically, the self-identifying labels Black Dutch, and to a far lesser extent, Black Irish, were adopted by mixed-race Indian and sometimes full blood Indian families of the South, first in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The practice of Cherokees calling themselves "Black Dutch" originated during and after the Trail of Tears era. They did this to explain their dark looks and to avoid being deported or stigmatized by colonial society.

One of the earliest Cherokee Indians to have been called "Dutch" was Tah-Chee, who died in 1848. He was known both as "Dutch," and "Captain William Dutch" -- and noted as such when his portrait was published in the 1837 book "Indian Tribes of North America" by Thomas L. McKenney (1785-1859) and James Hall (1793-1868). Dutch was a revered Cherokee chief and a talented hunter, who led his people to Texas in a failed attempt to escape the genocidal forced removal of the Trail of Tears. He acquired a significant amount of land for his tribe along the Canadian River in Texas after fighting with the Osage and Comanche tribes, but he was defeated by U.S. government forces, and was forced into retirement in Indian Territory, later known as the state of Oklahoma.

In addition to taking on spurious "Black Dutch" heritage to avoid removal during the Trail of tears era, Native Americans, mainly Cherokee, but also Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and other tribal people, sometimes created a false "Black Dutch" or "Black Irish" heritage in order to purchase land in the face of treaties and other laws that forbade them to own acreage in areas that had been reserved for people of European descent. Once they had possession of the land, the Cherokee and mixed-race families who had successfully resisted forced removal during the Trail of Tears era would not admit to their actual heritage for fear the property would be taken away from them.

The following explanation of the terms "Black Dutch" and "Black irish" is displayed on the wall of the Oakville Indian Mounds Park and Museum in Lawrence County, Alabama:

Before the Indian Removal Act in 1830, many of Lawrence County's Cherokee people were already mixed with white settlers and stayed in the country of the Warrior Mountains.  They denied their ancestry and basically lived much of their lives in fear of being sent West.  Full bloods claimed to be Black Irish or Black Dutch, thus denying their rightful Indian blood.  After being fully assimilated into the general population years later, these Irish Cherokee mixed blood descendants, began reclaiming their Indian heritage in the land of the Warrior Mountains, Lawrence County, Alabama.  During the 1900 U.S. Census only 78 people claimed their Indian heritage.  In 1990, more than 2000 individuals claimed Indian descent.  Today more than 4000 citizens are proud to claim their Indian heritage and are members of the Echota Cherokee tribe. 

Over time, as the Indians were pushed westward, the term "Black Dutch" migrated with certain families of mixed ancestry from North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennnesse to Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Oklahoma, where its original meaning became lost. In fact, many people born in the 20th century have claimed Black Dutch heritage, sometimes in addition to Native heritage, without knowing who their "Black Dutch" ancestors really were. Most of the mixed-race "Black Dutch" families of the South have English or Scots-Irish sounding surnames, with no trace of German or Dutch surnames in their families.

German Gypsies

German Gypsies (Roma People) are also known as Black Dutch, and there is some overlap in surnames between present-day Gypsies and the American families with a "Black Dutch" tradition.

See also

• Melungeon
• Black Irish

External links

• In Search of the Black Dutch by Myra Vanderpool Gormley, C.G.
• "Gypsies" in the United States
• Wayfaring Stranger: The Black Dutch, German Gypsies, or Chicanere, and their relation to the Melungeon by Linda D. Griggs
• Wayfaring Strangers 1
• Wayfaring Strangers 2
• Black Dutch
• Black Dutch Group