The Lost Colony of Roanoke: Did They Survive?

By Roberta Estes

The Lost Colony of Roanoke – what an enduring mystery – for 431 years it has remained unsolved and fascinated Americans and the British, alike.

An entire tourist industry has sprung up around the mystery of the Lost Colony along the Outer Banks in North Carolina. An open-air theater tells the story every summer on Roanoke Island near where Fort Raleigh was established. Tourists drift south to Hatteras Island across a long bridge that today connects Roanoke Island to Hatteras Island, the location where the colonists themselves indicated they were moving when they left the Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island.

Cont. here: https://dna-explained.com/2018/06/28/the-lost-colony-of-roanoke-did-they-survive-national-geographic-archaeology-historical-records-and-dna/







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Cherokee Revealed - Translated Moravian records disclose a forgotten history

Hat Tip: Laree

Cherokee Revealed - Translated Moravian records disclose a forgotten history

CHURCH MISSIONS: 19TH-CENTURY DOCUMENTS

Courtesy of Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA.

This map showing the settlements of the Cherokee Nation was drawn by Moravian missionary John Daniel Hammerer and is dated to 1766.

Published: September 8, 2009

In front of the house stands a long, open shed covered with clapboards adequately provided with benches and other seats, as well as a raised plank for writing on. The Talk was held under this shed. At a short distance from this stands a tall pole. A designated Indian took his position at this pole with a drum, and beat the drum as a sign of the beginning of the meeting. He kept drumming until Indians were seen coming in lines. In the heat, the Indians used turkey wings in stead of fans to make a breeze for themselves. -- Report from Abraham Steiner, a Moravian missionary to the Cherokee at Springplace, Ga., May 22, 1801, translated from the German.

This glimpse into the shared history of Moravians and Cherokees was shrouded in archaic German script for over 200 years at the Moravian Archives in Winston-Salem.

The words were found among hundreds of diaries, letters and other papers that recorded about 100 years of history between the Moravian missionaries and their Cherokee brethren. The records constitute the only known account of daily life in the Cherokee nation.

In 1992, workers began to translate and transcribe the documents. But money grew tight and work slowed on the project because the staff had to consider prioritizing other projects and possibly cutting back hours or staff, said Daniel Crews, the archivist of the Moravian Church, Southern Province.

Then earlier this year, members of the Cherokee Nation made a $125,000 grant, to be paid over five years, to translate and transcribe the documents. The archives have committed two archivists to work on the collection two days a week for the next five years, Crews said, with the hope of publishing their findings in a series of books after the work is complete.

The Cherokee Nation is made up of those people descended from ancestors who survived the Trail of Tears, the removal of the Cherokee in 1838 from the Eastern United States to the Indian Territory, which is now Oklahoma.

The Eastern Band, the Cherokee whose ancestors went into the mountains rather than accept removal, have also agreed to help pay for the project, Crews said, but have not announced how much they will donate.

The records contain details about what the Cherokee ate, how they built their villages, and the way they danced and dressed.
Jack Baker, a member of the Cherokee Nation tribal council, said that such information is available nowhere else.

Cont. here:

http://www.journalnow.com/news/local/cherokee-revealed---translated-moravian-records-disclose-a-forgotten/article_7ab2e4dc-e315-5a72-ad4d-d9d99a15db1a.html



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Hurricanes on the Eastern Seaboard were Much Worse 5,000 Years Ago

We hear that hurricanes are growing worse, but that idea does not hold up under scrutiny. In fact a new technique is showing just the opposite. One can only imagine the horrors visited upon the Indians living there at the time.

According to this book; Hurricanes and Typhoons: Past, Present, and Future
by Richard J. Murnane (Editor), Kam-biu Liu (Editor)

"Paleotempestology is an emerging field of science that studies past tropical cyclone activity mainly through the use of geological proxy techniques..."

A study of the past 5,000 years reveals the past 1.000 years to have been relatively quiet.

http://www.amazon.com/reader/0231123884?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib_sip_pdp_pg&query=hurricane%20history#reader

http://www.amazon.com/reader/0231123884?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib_sip_pdp_pg&query=hurricane%20history#reader


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If a Tree Fell on the Eastern Shore and No One Heard it, Would there Still Be Artifacts?

EASTERN SHORE

It started with an uprooted tree in the yard, which left a big hole, which opened a window into the past.

Colonial-era clay pipes and pottery pieces. Hand-forged nails and odd yellow-ish bricks. Tiny coins – one of the oldest types of farthing. And jetons – brass tokens once used for accounting that have rarely been found in this country.

It wasn’t the first time scientists had descended on Eyreville. In 2005, an international geology team spent months on the property, coring more than a mile deep into a 56-mile-wide underground crater that was blasted by a meteor 35 million years ago.

On that deep-time calendar, the 400-year-old artifacts in the yard were left there, like, yesterday.

But in U.S. history terms, that’s significant. The so-called Contact Period spanned 1520 to 1620, the dawn of European settlement here. Rare stuff.

The jetons? They match others excavated from the oldest parts of the 1607 fort at Jamestown and at Roanoke Island, the last known location of what became the Lost Colony.

Cont. here:

http://pilotonline.com/news/local/history/a-tree-fell-on-the-eastern-shore-and-unearthed-a/article_c05265de-8c44-55b1-9124-dbb822941af2.html

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Happy Birthday, Virginia Dare

 

 Happy Birthday,

Virginia Dare

World Atlas 

 Virginia Dare was born on August 18, 1587, the first child born in the Americas to English parents. She was born into the short-lived Roanoke Colony in what is now the U.S. State of North Carolina. What became of Virginia and the other colonists remains a mystery. The fact of her birth is known because the governor of the settlement, Virginia Dare's grandfather, John White, returned to England in 1587 to seek fresh supplies and reported it. When White eventually returned three years later, Virginia and the other colonists were gone and they were never seen from again. This painting is of her baptism ceremony. http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/namerica/usstates/nc.htm

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Archaeologists find pieces of a small medicine jar that are linked to the Lost Colony

MANTEO, N.C.

Archaeologists have found pottery pieces that could have been part of a jar belonging to a medicine maker of the Roanoke voyages, and even a member of the lost colony.

The two quarter-sized fragments, colored blue, white and brown, were buried in the soil two feet below the surface not far from The Lost Colony theater ticket house. An earthen mound believed to be a fort from the period lies 75 yards from the discovery site.

“It was an exciting find,” said Eric Deetz, an archaeologist with the First Colony Foundation who was part of the dig earlier this month. “That pottery had something to do with the Elizabethan presence on that island.”

The ointment or medicine jar would have been 3 inches tall and 1.5 inches in diameter, Deetz said. He called it the most significant piece of pottery found in the area since the 1940s.

Continued here:

http://tinyurl.com/zfporpt


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The Life of Angus Chavers, a Confederate POW

The Life of Angus Chavers, a Confederate POW

Angus Chavers and his wife Melissa

The Life of Angus Chavers, a Confederate POW

Dr. Dean Chavers

March 12, 2013

Most of the Lumbees who fought in the Civil War were in the Confederate Army. A second smaller group of them enlisted and fought in the Union Army, which meant they could possibly face their own brothers in battle. A third group was shanghaied or hijacked to work on the batteries and breastworks (temporary fortifications) around Fort Fisher near Wilmington; they were largely treated as slaves, and were assigned to do the rough work of construction. Many of them died at Fort Fisher from diseases caused by bad water and mosquitos.

A fourth group were local boys and men who refused to be conscripted to work on the breastworks, doing the work of slaves to build barriers to keep the Union soldiers out. Henry Berry Lowrie and some of his brothers refused to be enlisted; they knew they would be in the mud, dirt, and mosquitoes building breastworks; since they refused to work on the breastworks, they were cast out and labeled as outlaws by the Robeson County, North Carolina authorities.

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/03/12/life-angus-chavers-confederate-pow-147909




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Happy 428th Birthday, Virginia Dare!!!

Virginia Dare (born August 18, 1587, date of death unknown) was the first child born in the Americas to English parents, Eleanor (or Ellinor/Elyonor) and Ananias Dare. She was born into the short-lived Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina, USA. What became of Virginia and the other colonists has become an enduring mystery. The fact of her birth is known because the leader of the colony, Eleanor Dare's father, John White, returned to England to seek assistance for the colony. When White returned three years later, the colonists were gone.

Historical explanations

John Smith and other members of the Jamestown Colony sought information about the fate of the colonists in 1607. One report indicated that the Lost Colonists took refuge with friendly Chesapeake Indians, but Chief Powhatan claimed his tribe had attacked the group and killed most of the colonists. Powhatan showed Smith certain artifacts he said had belonged to the colonists, including a musket barrel and a brass mortar. The Jamestown Colony received reports of some survivors of the Lost Colony and sent out search parties, but none were successful. Eventually they determined they were all dead.^[1]
However, in her 2000 book Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony, historian Lee Miller postulated that some of the Lost Colony survivors sought shelter with a neighboring Indian tribe, the Chowanoc, that was attacked by another tribe, identified by the Jamestown Colony as the "Mandoag," but who Miller thinks were actually the Eno, also known as the Wainoke. Survivors were eventually sold into slavery and held captive by differing bands of the Eno tribe, who, Miller wrote, were known slave traders. Miller wrote that English settlers with the Jamestown Colony heard reports in 1609 of the captive Englishmen, but the reports were suppressed because they had no way to rescue the captives and didn't want to panic the Jamestown colonists. William Strachey, a secretary of the Jamestown Colony, wrote in his The History of Travel Into Virginia Britania in 1612 that, at the Indian settlements of Peccarecanick and Ochanahoen, there were reportedly two-story houses with stone walls. The Indians supposedly learned how to build them from the Roanoake settlers.^[2] There were also reported sightings of European captives at various Indian settlements during the same time period.^[3] Strachey wrote in 1612 that four English men, two boys, and one maid had been sighted at the Eno settlement of Ritanoc, under the protection of a chief called Eyanoco. The captives were forced to beat copper. The captives, he reported, had escaped the attack on the other colonists and fled up the Chaonoke river, the present-day Chowan River in Bertie County, North Carolina.^[4][2][5] For four hundred years, various authors have speculated that the captive girl was Virginia Dare. When White left the colony in 1587, there were eighty-seven men, seventeen women and eleven children among the colonists. Virginia Dare was one of two infants born to colonists in 1587 and was the only female child in the Lost Colony.

Possible descendants

The Chowanoc tribe was eventually absorbed into the Tuscarora. The Eno tribe was also associated with the Shakori tribe and was later absorbed by the Catawba or the Saponi tribes. Today one group is known as the Haliwa-Saponi tribe. From the early 1600s to the middle 1700s European colonists reported encounters with gray-eyed American Indians or with Welsh-speaking Indians who claimed descent from the colonists.^[6][7] In 1669 a Welsh cleric named Morgan Jones was taken captive by the Tuscarora. He feared for his life, but a visiting Doeg Indian war captain spoke to him in Welsh and assured him that he would not be killed. The Doeg warrior ransomed Jones and his party and Jones remained with their tribe for months as a preacher.^[6] In 1701, surveyor John Lawson encountered members of the Hatteras tribe living on Roanoke Island who claimed some of their ancestors were white people. Lawson wrote that several of the Hatteras tribesmen had gray eyes.^[7] Some present-day American Indian tribes in North Carolina and South Carolina, among them the Coree and the Lumbee tribes, also claim partial descent from surviving Roanoke colonists. A non-profit organization, the Lost Colony of Roanoke DNA Project, has launched a Lost Colony DNA Project to test possible descendants.

Copyright (c) 2008 History Chasers

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document

under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2

or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;

with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU

Free Documentation License".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

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A fascinating look at "Old Hatteras Island"

A fascinating look at "Old Hatteras Island"

My grandfather was Luther Frazier Peele (1905-'67) ~  his mother was Elizabeth Gaskill Peele; Granny Lizzy was the last of our family to keep in contact with relatives back in the old country (Cornwall, UK).  According to our ancestry search, my grandfather's family dates back to the 1700's on the "Carolina Banks". His g-g-g...grandfather Robert Peel, was born in England in 1635 and was "spirited" away to theKing's Virginian colonies soon thereafter. Hatteras has long been a destination for people "on the lamb." During the 17th century, thousands of Irish & Scots were imprisoned in Britain by Oliver Cromwell's ethnic-cleansing tirades. The ones who survived (about half), were "transported" to the colonies. Scottish prisoners were allowed to choose their final destination ~ the grim prospect of working as a plantation slave in Barbados & Virginia drove some to Hatteras. It is unclear whether they came of their own free will (w/ livestock) or came to hide ended up staying. The village elders seemed peculiar to outsiders because of their antiquated vocabulary and thick brogue... and the women, who were sturdy by necessity, often smoked pipes or dipped snuff. 

Cont. here: http://hatterasgear.com/oldhatte.html

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Jamestown heals a broken heart (ring)

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