However limited European-Indian mixing may have been, present-day 
anecdotal evidence suggests that intermixing between Afro-Virginians 
and Native peoples was widespread.

My source: oral family histories produced by the students my husband 
taught in a predominantly African-American middle school in Prince 
George's County, Maryland, in the late 1990s, a very high proportion of 
which claimed Indian ancestry.

Of course I have no way of verifying the students' claims, but they 
stand as either genealogical evidence or as (equally interesting) 
evidence of cultural identification.

Recall that Prince George's County was historically entirely typical of 
the tobacco-plantation economy that characterized the early 
Chesapeake--so much so that it formed the basis for Allan Kulikoff's 
important study Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern 
Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press for the 
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 
Williamsburg, 1986).  And though not all these students had long family 
roots in the county, many did.  So I am guessing that African-American 
families in present-day Virginia also cite Indian ancestry in very high 
numbers.

But there must be a number of people on this list who know much more 
about this subject than I do.  Can someone shed some light on it?  
Thanks.

--Jurretta


On Feb 28, 2007, at 12:02 PM, Debra Jackson/Harold Forsythe wrote:

> I suspect that since the number of European women in Virginia was 
> small--VA was 2:1 male in 1700 according to Edmund Morgan--the amount 
> of interbreeding as opposed to intermarriage was rather high.  Thus, 
> the descendants of the earliest Virginia settlers may well tend to be 
> mixed, while those who came later and who were less likely to share in 
> the tobacco boom times of the 17th century, including  thousands of 
> convict laborers from the United Kingdom, were ironically more likely 
> to be pure (whatever that means) European.  But ironies abound in 
> Virginia's colonial history.  I corresponded with an anthropologist 
> from MD who was working on African-Americans descended from 
> Afro-Asians brought in the 17th and 18th century slave trade to the 
> Chesapeake from Madagascar.  I also read somewhere (wish I remembered 
> where) that for some reason at least one boatload of Mayans were 
> brought from Central America in the 18th century and landed in 
> Norfolk.
>
> Virginia like many other constructed societies has certain myths of 
> origins and identities and even more complex and fascinating 
> realities.
>
> Harold S. Forsythe

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