Elvis Presley’s “Melungeon” Ancestry

Below is an abstract from the book “The Melungeons: The Resurrection of A Proud People;
An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America,”by Dr. N. Brent Kennedy.[1]

Mavi Boncuk |

“The Melungeons” second, revised, and corrected edition; page 140. Kennedy writes:

“Yes, Elvis Presley had North Carolina roots; his mother’s family left western North Carolina in the early 1800s, taking with them their legend of a Cherokee and Jewish heritage. His maternal great-great-great grandmother was supposedly “a full blooded Cherokee” from Tennessee named Morning Dove White. However, White is a far more common Lumbee, Melungeon, and Powhatan than Cherokee surname, and Morning Dove is an uncommon Cherokee given name. Also, the man she married, William Mansell, had been something of a renowned Indian fighter, making his choice of a “full-bloodied Cherokee” questionable. Mansell’s family was also native South Carolinian since the 1700s, placing them more in Lumbee than Cherokee territory. In any event, William Mansell and Morning Dove White settled in Alabama around 1820, and had several children, including John Mansell, Elvis’s great-great grandfather. John later abandoned his family to run off with a younger woman named Mandy Bennett (another Lumbee surname).

In 1870, John’s son White Mansell married a woman named Martha Tackett from Tennessee. Martha also possessed a common Melungeon surname and, even more appropriately, claimed to be Jewish. Elaine Dundy’s excellent biography of Elvis provides fascinating genealogical background and unintentionally paints a rather convincing Melungeon heritage for the “King of Rock and Roll.”

[1] Amateur genealogist and professional university administrator, N. Brent Kennedy, has theorized in "The Melungeans: The Resurrection of a Proud People" (1994) that the Melungeans comprise a distinct ethnic group living primarily in the Upper American South in part descended from Portuguese and Turkish adventurers. Some researchers still maintain that the group's origin stems from the intermarriage of freed slaves with European indentured servants to create an Atlantic Creole mix in the 17th and 18th centuries. Indeed, a limited DNA sampling of people who consider themselves Melungeons reveals that they are mostly of European ancestry but that they also possess small percentages of African American and Native American DNA. However, other limited samplings of different self-identified Melungeons contain some Eurasian or Middle Eastern DNA. Dr. Kennedy suggests that Elvis, Ava Gardner, and Abraham Lincoln all had Melungeon roots.