My own researches have shown me that some of my earliest ancestors in the New World on my great-grandmother’s side took Indian women for wives a long time ago.
A certain Thomas Blalock (1581-1660), for one, is listed as a survivor of “The Starving Time” in John Smith’s ‘Historie of Virginia’ (1624), and married a Nassawadox Indian woman named Rachel Cates in 1627 and had 5 children with her. For another, his great-grandson Millington married a Chowanoke Indian woman named Elizabeth Mourning Green in 1741 and had 11 children with her. Both Blalock intermarriages happened before the 13 colonies declared Independence to become the United States of America, a fun and fascinating thing to think about for me personally.
Yet the funny thing about such discoveries is how at a certain point, after so many generations, one is surprised to make them. And I think the reason one is surprised sometimes to find racial diversity in their family tree is for one simple fact: we’re all family.
The Bible teaches that all men descend from the one man, Adam. And even from there, after considering the Flood, we all descend from another man, Noah. The fact that the family tree branched out from there to fill the Earth was not accidental or erroneous, but by God’s design. Or why else did He say, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth and subdue it”?
For my part, it matters not at all whether my sons and daughter someday marry the descendants of other tribes, so long as all the above are in the second Adam – that is, Jesus. But perhaps all the more rather than less. The rationale my Grandma Ranew gave for why interracial marriage should be discouraged is a reason the Church ought to celebrate the union of Christian men and women, whatever their respective ethnos, so long as they remember their first love and are true to one another.
