Barbados Link-- Melungeon KinFolk?

Barbados Link May Provide 'Smoking Gun' Clue to Melungeon Surnames

Melungeon ancestry possibilities have expanded to include significant numbers of 'English' and 'Scotch' settlers who came to South Carolina in the late 1600s and early 1700s, but not from England. Although these people held English citizenship, their actual ethnic make-up was far different from the prototype Anglos of that period. These settlers were from Barbados, ethnically mixed people seeking better lives in the mainland colonies.
These so-called 'freedmen' tended to be a mixture of English and Scotch, native Barbadians (i.e. Indian), Portuguese Jews, other Mediterranean people, and Africans. And, most telling, their surnames match those English names that most commonly show up among the earliest Melungeon populations. It would seem likely that, over time, these ethnically mixed 'Englishmen' would have indeed moved northward and admixed with Melungeon ancestral groups in the Carolinas and Virginia. There are many related documents detailing the movements of these early settlers, but one will suffice for this first announcement (this document kindly provided by Angela Andrews of the University of Virginia). John Camden Hotten's work on the Barbados settlers provides the following astonishing surname list of 'English' settlers from Barbados: (see below for Library of Congress citations) "