I am
searching for GOWENS GOWANS GOINS roots.
My maternal ggrandpa Robert
Busby
(of Cedartown, GA) married Mary Jane Gowens in Dec. 1888 (Cherokee
co., AL
marriage records). She had been maried
before in Aug. 1885 to
Franklin
Stone (no indication if he died, left, or they divorced--though
divorce
was very uncommon then). Robert and
Mary jane's first son was Fred
Busby,
my mother's father, born dec. 1889.
Mary
Jane Gowens was born Aug. 6, 1866 in Rock Run, AL (east of Gadsden, AL
west of Cedartown, GA)--died Nov 1918. Her father was James L. Gowens and
her
mother was Marcena ?--born in SC. I am
led to
believe that Gowens,etc. is a melungeon and/or Indian name and
background. Does anyone know about these Gowens, busbys
or for that
matter,
the Spear, Coursey, Marsh, Lynch lines?
Mary
jane Gowens suffered from asthma and died as a result of being given
wrong
medicine for her asthma attcks.
Carolyn
Funderburk
funderbk@wilmington.net
Gowen
Research Foundation
Electronic
Newsletter
January
2000
Volume
3 No. 1
This is
the first manuscript in a series exclusively for the Gowen Research
Foundation. It may not be reprinted or sold without the
permission of the
author.
October 8, 2000
Biography: Tim Hashaw is an investigative reporter
living in Houston, Texas.
He has filed stories for CBS, ABC, and NBC
and he has worked as a journalist
in
radio, television and print. Tim Hashaw
received numerous national awards
for
excellence in journalism from: the Radio and Television News Directors'
Association
(RTNDA), the Associated Press, United Press International, the
National
Headliners Club and others. Tim is a
seventh generation Texan and a
descendant
of James Goyne, born May 30, 1755 in Mecklinburg County, Virginia.
Origin
of the Melungeons, Part One:
by Tim
Hashaw
Many
ideas have been advanced to explain the possible origin of the North
American
people known as the 'Melungeons'.
Recent discoveries have narrowed
that
list of theories. Melungeons were
settled early in Virginia, the
Carolinas,
eastern Tennessee and Kentucky. They
have a mixed heritage of
European, African, and Native American ancestry.
New
light in the past few years reveals that the earliest Africans arriving
in the
English American colonies of the 17th century, came from a district of
Angola,
Africa called Melange. This research
shows that the vast majority of
hundreds
of Africans shipped to Norh America between the years 1619-1660 were
in fact
Melange Angolans. And it may be that
just as the place-name of
"Angola"
was brought by early Africans to various American communities, and
just as
they identified themselves as "Portuguese", so too the word
"Melange"
survives
in the present form of "Melungeon" as a memory of their original
homeland.
Several
clues taken together may yield the secrets of the Melungeons of North
American. It is commonly known that the 17th century
colonial
African-Americans
were not regarded as slaves, but as indentured servants who
earned
their freedom, owned land, and sometimes married Europeans. Their
descendants
were documented in the same counties we also find ancestors of
the
Melungeons. The brief window of
opportunity offered by this early period
of
co-equal black and white indentured servitude from 1619-1660 was opened
just
long enough to give birth to this new people of mingled European,
African
and Native blood; a people whose ancestors constituted many of what
the
U.S. government later called "free coloureds".
The
Melange Angolans are the first African Americans whose descendants can be
traced
up to the present day. However,
Africans ventured into the New World
long
before the 17th century. Rock
inscriptions in West Texas reveal the
passing
of Libyan adventurers in the ancient past.
It is logical that
Africans
arrived in the Americas ahead of the Europeans since it is off the
coast
of Africa that the Southern Passage begins in the crossing of the
Atlantic
Ocean westward to the New World. The
route of Christopher Columbus
began
in the Canary Islands from northwest Africa.
The
impact these pre-Columbian African travellers may have had in the new
continent
is debated. But after that date
Africans were introduced quickly
into
the Americas as slaves of the Spanish.
In the 16th century, a great
number
of blacks were captured or purchased by Spain and Portugal from the
Congo. But just about the time that England first
began settling Virginia,
the
Portuguese were preparing to launch an all-out military invasion and
colonization
of Angola which bordered the Congo to the south. From 1618 to
1621
Portugal carried out its most important operation to enslave Angola in a
massive
military campaign against the Kimbundu-speaking subjects of the
Kingdom
of Ndongo in the highlands and tributaries of the Melange Plateau of
western
African. During that exact time period
Melange Africans from Angola
would
begin arriving in Virginia and their descendants would be numbered one
day
among the Virginia-area people known as Melungeons.
Melange
is a mountainous district of central Angola.
Today it could serve as
a
poster child for the movement to ban landmines in the wake of continous
fighting
between government forces and rebel armies.
But 400 years ago, the
Melange
Plateau was the flourishing homeland of the tribes making up the
Kingdom
of Ndongo. In this district, still
known today as Melange, is the
modern
city of Melanje, less than ten miles from the ancient royal Ndongo
city of
Kabasa. The king who ruled Ndongo at
its greatest was Mbandi Ngola
Kiluanji. The name "Angola" comes from
"ngola" which means "ruler".
In 1618
Portugal opened her assault on the Melange peoples living between the
Lukala
and Kwanza rivers just a year before Melange Angolans would appear in
Jamestown,
Virginia. Portuguese governor Luis
Mendes de Vasconcelos had
arrived
at the Angola port of Luanda in 1617.
He was eager to lead the
military
campaign into the interior country.
What source of profit did the
Portuguese
seek? During just three short years
Vasconcelos would capture and
export
50,000 Melange Angolans. Professor John
Thorton says in an article
for
William and Mary Quarterly, that from 1618 to 1621 this capture of 50,000
slaves
was "far more than were exported before or would be again for some
decades." From among those 50,000 Melange- Angolans
would come the first
African
American ancestors of the Melungeons of North America.
Before
the arrival of Vasconcelos, the Portuguese had once tried to conquer
Angola
only to be soundly defeated by the Ndongo at the Battle of the Lukala
River
in 1589. Now, 29 years later, Portugal
would again thrust at the
independant
Ndongo, but this time with the assistance of a mercenary tribe of
Africans
called, 'the Imbangala'. These
Imbangala warriors were dreaded
cannibals
who practiced witchcraft; a "quasi-religious cult devoted to
bloodlust,
selfishness and greed" according to Thornton. They were cruel,
burying
alive any infant born in their camps, so that they may always be
ready
to move. They maintained their numbers
exclusively by kidnapping and
training
the children of their victims to be warriors.
Thornton says of
their tactics:
"The Imbangala generally made a large encampment in the
country
they intended to pillage, after arriving near harvest time. They
forced
the local authorities either to fight them outright, or to withdraw
into
fortified locations, leaving the fields for the Imbangala to harvest.
Once
their enemies were weakened by fighting or lack of food, they could make
the
final assault on their lands and capture them.
The presence of
Portuguese
slave traders, who also provided firearms, made raiding people as
profitable
or even more profitable as raiding food and livestock had been
before." To insure that there would be no second
Portuguese defeat, Mendes
de
Vasconcelos enlisted three companies of the Imbangala to join his own
infantry
and cavalry for the new campaign against the Ndongo of Melange
Angola.
At that
time the Ndongo people were ripe for outside attack. The
brothers-in-law
of the king, Mbandi Ngola Kiluanji, had exploited their
standing
to commit many crimes, leaving several nobles incensed against them.
A rebel soba, (a district chief) named Kavalo
Ka Kabasa lured the king into
a trap
on the Lukala River in 1617 and overthrew him.
Kiluanji's
son and heir, Ngola Mbandi, had not yet gained the full support of
his
divided sobas when Vasconcellos launched his attack in 1618. The
Portuguese
with the Imbangala first hit and defeated the armies of a soba
named
Kaita Ka Balanga across the Kwanza River.
With the loss of Balanga's
forces,
the royal palace in Kabasa was completely vulnerable and the
Portuguese-Imbangala
companies seized it along with hundreds of captives for
the
slave market.
After
the winter season of 1618-1619, the military campaign resumed in the
spring
of 1619 as the Portuguese with their savage allies killed 95 sobas and
defeated
the forces under them. The untried
prince, Ngola Mbandi, fled
Kabasa
abandoning his family and his many wives to be carried away with a
great
multitude of Ndongo in chains, royalty and subjects alike. In time,
the
center of the Ndongo kingdom would relocate in Melange and fight back
under
the dynamic leadership of the famous Queen Njinga (1624-1663). But
from
1619 onward, the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the Portuguese again,
would
continue to prey upon the Ndongo of the Melange highlands through out
the
17th century. Thousands upon thousands
of the Melange Angolans were
shipped
westward across the ocean to Spanish plantations and mines in the New
World
in this period. Some of the Spanish
merchant slavers would be captured
by
English and Dutch privateers and their slave cargo would be rerouted to
North
America. The English would buy others
from the Sugar Islands. But
note
the chain of events and the circumstances occurring at precisely the
same
time:
1. At the fall of the Ndongo capital of Kabasa
in Melange Angola, the
Virginia
colony of North America was but 12 years old.
The starving
colonists
had finally found their economic miracle in a new strain of tobacco
and
they needed a large labor force to plant and harvest this lucrative crop.
Smoking had become the rage in Europe around
1616 and the Virginians were
growing
the stuff in the streets, so frantic were they to profit. In late
August
of 1619, only months after the fall of the African capital and the
capture
of thousands of its inhabitants, the first arrival of "20 and odd
Negroes" was recorded in Jamestown, Virginia by John
Rolfe, husband of
Pocahontas. They came to America one year before the
Pilgrims landed at
Plymouth
Rock. These Melange Angolans and 200 others two months earlier had
been
placed aboard the Spanish slave-merchant, the "San Juan Bautista" in
the
port of
Luanda, Angola for delivery to the mines of Vera Cruz, Mexico. The
ship
had almost reached its destination when it was attacked in the West
Indies
by two English privateers. One
privateer, Captain John Jope of
Cornwall,
in his man-o-war, the 'White Lion", took his share of the prize of
slaves
to Jamestown where he traded the 22 Africans to the American colonists
of
Virginia for corn in August 1619. There
is little doubt that these
Angolans
were Portuguese captives from the Melange Ndongo war.
2. During this time, the English American
colonists of Virginia were
relatively
unfamiliar with the large slave plantation system used by the
Spanish
colonists. Since the Magna Carta, the
English had a system of
indentured
servitude which freed the servant after a space of time, usually
seven
years. Lifelong slavery was not yet, in
the period of 1619-1650, a
common
practice in the Virginia colony. From
the time the first Melange
Angolans
were delivered to Jamestown in 1619 until around the 1660s,
African-Americans
enjoyed the same measure of freedom and rights given to
white
English indentured servants. These
African Americans of 17th century
Virginia
were released after indenture, they bought land and they themselves
owned
black and white, male and female servants.
Many Melange Angolan males
married
white European women during this period of the English American
colonies. The differences in races of the couples were
often noted in
official
documents. Their mixed race children
would be recorded as "free
coloureds"
in the later census. The only time the
Africans held this kind of
freedom
in early America was during the colonial period from the 1620s to the
1660s,
the very period when the great majority of slaves being shipped west
from
Africa were almost exclusively Portuguese captives from Melange Angola.
3. The third situation to note is that at the
time she was first planting
colonies
in North America, (1610-1660), England was not yet established as a
significant
slave trading nation. The argument is
hard to make that the
first
Africans came to America anywhere else but from Melange Angola. The
American
colonies were at this time dependant for African man-power from
sources
such as English and Dutch pirates and privateers who preyed upon the
Portuguese
and Spanish ships leaving Luanda, Angola to cross the Atlantic
Ocean
with Melange slaves. The Virginians
relied on men like John Powell,
captain
of the pirate ship, the Hopewell.
Another privateer was John Jope, a
Calvinist
minister who captained the man-o-war, the 'White Lion' under Dutch
authority. Another was a Captain Guy who seized slaves
from a ship off the
African
coast and traded them to Jamestown
colonists for tobacco in 1628.
These
freelance English privateers were taking slaves from Spanish ships who
had
earlier bought them from the Portuguese controlling Angola in 1621. At
that
time the Portuguese had conquered no part of Angola other than the
Melange
area.
The
English American colonies also brought Africans in from the Sugar Islands
and for
a time from the Dutch who, in the 1640s took Angola from the
Portuguese
and for a decade redirected Melange captives into Dutch interests
like
New Amsterdam (today's New York). Dutch
New Yorkers resold many of
these
Africans to Virginia colonists. It is
important to remember that from
1619 to
1660, the main source for captured Africans available to North
America,
was the Melange area of Angola, Africa between the Lukala and Kwanza
rivers
of the old kingdom of Ndongo. And the
timing of the availability of
Melange
Africans to Virginia coincided with the relatively short period when
liberal
Virginia laws gave Africans equal rights with whites in the 17th
century.
One of
the first Africans to appear in the documents of the Virginia colony
was
John Geaween or Gowan, sometimes incorrectly translated 'Graweere'.
Geaween,
a servant of colonist William Evans, had a son by Margaret Cornish,
an
African servant of Robert Sheppard of Elizabeth Cittie in the Virginia
Colony.
That son is believed by some genealogists to have been Mihill Goin,
sometimes
named as 'Gowen'. In 1641, John Geaween
earned his freedom and
purchased
his own land. He also received the
freedom of his young son from
Sheppard
in court.
Mihill
Goin was raised by another Virginia colonist, Christopher Stafford,
who may
have taught him to read and write.
Mihill had a son, William, by an
African
woman servant named Rosa. Rosa's
mistress was Ann Stafford
Barnhouse,
sister of Captain Stafford. In the
1650s Ann is recorded as
acknowledging
the freedom of Mihill and his son William, though not the
liberty
of Rosa. Mihill Goin bought land and he
apparently re-married a
white
woman and had other children by her; children sometimes referred to in
Virginia
papers as "mulattoes".
Interracial marriages of this kind were not
at all
uncommon at that time in colonial Virginia history.
The
Goin surname from 1630s Virginia, along with its numerous variations, is
one of
the most common surnames in almost all tri-racial groups in North
America
including the Melungeons. Since the
vast majority of incoming
Africans
in the 17th century were from Melange Angola, it is almost certain
that
the Melange area was the native home of the first Goins in early 17th
century
Virginia. It is in this area of
Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and
the
Carolinas that Melungeons, tri-racial and free coloureds, first appear
early
in American history.
Could
the name "Melange" have survived the harsh Middle Passage from Africa
to
America? An African named Antonio was
one of the first to arrive in
Virginia. He married, prospered and had children. Years later, his
grandson,
John Johnson Jr. purchased a 44-acre tract in 1677 in Somerset.
The
grandson of the African patriarch built a plantation and called it...
"Angola",
nearly 60 years after the arrival of the old Portuguese captive.
Memories
and stories lingered.
Is it
also possible that the name "Melange" managed to survive in the form
of
"Melungeon",
especially since the 17th century African ancestors of the
Melungeons
almost certainly originated in Melange Angola?
Some
say "Melungeon" comes from a French word, "melange" meaning
"mixture".
But the
French who had a number of African colonies, did not refer to blacks
or
mixed races as "Melungeons".
They habitually used Spanish loan words like
"mulatto"
and "mestizo" to describe mixed African and white blood. It is not
likely
that this name was given to North American tri-racials by the French.
It may
be that "Melungeon" is a name retained by the descendants of the
first
blacks
to Virginia in 1619 and also by hundreds who came later, to describe
their
original African locality. It was not a
name given them by their
masters,
employers or neighbors. Thousands of
Melange African-Americans also
correctly
identified themselves as "Portuguese" after that nation which had
colonized
Angola in the 17th century. They
claimed that nationality in the
face of
English skepticism. Could not they also
have remember "Melange"?
Thorton
writes, "It is probable that, in the decades that followed, those who
survived
the first year in Virginia eventually encountered more Angolans from
their
homeland or from the nearby Congo, brought especially to New York by
Dutch
traders and resold to Virginia colonists...These new captives perhaps
gave a
certain Angolan touch to the early Chesapeake." The glut of
Portuguese
slave traffic from Angola may also have thrown old Melange Ndongo
comrades
together in early Virginia.
During
the ensuing years, different roads were taken by descendants of Mihill
Goin of
colonial Jamestown. Some of his sons
married African women, others
married
into Native American tribes, and still others married European women.
After 400 years, these branches may have
little or no physical resemblance
to each
other. But the three branches share
roots in the highlands of
Melange
Angola no matter the present color of their skin. Originally the
name
"Melungeon" perhaps would not
have been used exclusively to describe
only
tri-racials. Early use would have
included all American descendants of
African
captives from the Melange Plateau of Angola in the 17th century.
Later
the ties of shared roots were lost among the many other non-Angolan
tribes
brought to America. It may have been
guarded only by the isolated
mixed-race
children of the early 17th century group of African Americans who
had
escaped the institution of slavery for life.
The
window of freedom in colonial America was opened only briefly to the
Melange
Africans, but apparently opened long enough to give birth to the
people
known today as the Melungeons.
The End
of Part One.
Hello
Arlee,
Yes,
I'm delighted to be back in circulation--quite a luxury after spending
the
last two years trying to bring my first book to publication while
working
on the research for the second. I
should be a fixture for the
forseeable
future. I am flattered that you would
want me on GRF's advisory
board
but would be happy to oblige.
As far
as my professional credentials go, I have degrees in U.S. history
from
Harvard (B.A. 1990) and Duke (M.A. 1992, Ph.D. 1996). My first book,
Southern
Workers and the Search for Community, was released this month from
University
of Illinois Press (check out their website if you're curious,
although
it's on a very different topic). My
interest in the Goinses and
like
families dates back to my teen years, when I worked (in my spare time)
as a
professional genealogist in Halifax Co., Va.; I was responsible, among
other things, for the two published volumes of
cemetery listings there.
While
doing research on other families at the courthouse I came across the
Goins,
Wilson, Epps, Stewart, and other "mulatto" families. I was
fascinated
to discover--as we all were, at one time or another--the
existence
of folks who were neither black nor white in a society like the
antebellum
South. Who were they? How did they survive? What became of
their
descendants? Certainly their very
existence challenged the rigid
black/white
racial views with which I had been raised in the 1970s and early
1980s. My interest simmered for years and almost
became my dissertation,
but
instead I opted to write first about my own family's heritage in the
Carolina
textile mills--a project that involved hundreds of oral interviews,
which,
of course, can only be postponed so long with elderly informants.
Now
that I've completed that book, my other research can assume its full
importance.
My
present project involves a rather large handful of families and
communities
in the NC/VA border counties, including their diaspora in TN,
KY, OH,
IN, IL, and elsewhere. I am interested
in how mixed-race families
maneuvered
in different times and places and under various circumstances as
American
society (and American racism) moved forward.
My hope is that
studying
families like the Goinses can shed light not only on how racial
attitudes
evolved in America, but also on other, forgotten, perhaps even
alternative
"racial scripts." In addition
to Goinstown and the Patrick Co.
Goinses,
I'm working on a congeries of families (25 or so) in Surry, Yadkin,
and
Stokes Cos.; three separate mixed-race communities in Wake Co., NC; the
so-called
"Person County Indian" group in Person Co., NC, and Halifax Co.,
VA; and
a number of other "stray" families in southside Virginia and central
NC. My genealogical research is odd in that I'm
trying to move forward in
time
rather than backward--hence my need to contact as many descendants as I
can. What I'm looking for are "racial
narratives"--accounts of family
origin,
racial makeup, etc., such as abound in the 1907-08 Cherokee
applications. To me, such stories are in and of themselves
fascinating,
whatever
the "proof" of ancestry might be.
And of course in many cases
we'll
never really know.
My
years as a graduate student were not pleasant; upon completion of my
Ph.D. I
opted out of professional academia entirely, making me an
"independent
scholar." Right now, however, I'm
between paying jobs, so I
may
take a teaching job--at least for a bit--in the coming year. We shall
see. In the meantime "independent scholar"
I remain.
Thanks
for resupplying me with the necessary log-in info. As soon as I have
a
chance to fully peruse the areas of the Manuscript I'm most interested in,
I'll
start forwarding updates. I'm
especially pleased with my work on the
Goinstown
"outreach" community at Benville, Indiana.
GC
Waldrep
Hi
Listmates,
I recently stumbled across the surname of
one of my great-grandmothers,
Sally
GAIN(e)S, who was living in Castleton, VT at the time of her marriage
to my
Alexander McARTHUR, c. 1804.
Alex's grandfather was from Scotland and
the Scot/NA connection has been
well
documented in several areas. I was just
wondering if there's any
possibility
that this might be the case here as 'GAINS' is so very close to
'GOINS'. I just haven't run across any previous
reference to any Goins
family
being in VT. Nor have I been able to
locate any info to date on the
GAINS
family either.
Is anyone familiar with this
possibility? I'd SURE appreciate ANY
help
here! I'm hopeful that this might prove to be my
NA connection.....
Best,
SueB
(typing
with fingers crossed)
Be sure
to include Renewal story in Oct.
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Arlee
Gowen, Editor
Gowen
Research Foundation
A
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E-mail:
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Manuscript--10,000+ pages of research on the
following Families:
Gawan, Gawans, Gawen, Gawens, Gawin,
Gawins, Gawn,
Gawne, Gawnes, Goain,
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Goane, Goans, Goen,
Goene, Goens, Goin, Goines, Going,
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Gorin Gouen, Gouens,
Gowain, Gowan,
Gowane, Gowanes, Gowan,
Gowans, Gowen,
Gowene, Gowens, Gowin,
Gowine, Gowing,
Gowins, Gown, Gowne,
Gownes, Gowyn,
Goyen, Goyens, Goyne,
Goynes, Goynne,
McGowan, McGowen, McGowin,
O'Gowan, O'Gowen
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