Of the early explorer families of Tennessee and the namesake for Waldens Ridge. Wiggins is probably related to Eleazar Wiggans, a prominent Jewish trader among the Yuchi and other southeastern Indians. Neighboring counties Duplin, Bladen, Brunswick, Johnson, Onslow and New Hanover have some, but not as many:

John, Fleet, Core, William and Daniel Cooper were in Sampson at the time (one of my lines, known to be crypto-Jewish, like Boone). Also, there is a former town on the South River named Lisbon! Some of these, if not the majority, were Portuguese Jews. Before the time of the Revolution, there was a rabbi, synagogue, school and Hebrew library in a little town called Warrenton in Bute County on the North Carolina Piedmont. The governors of the synagogue used a Freemason's Lodge as their "sponsor," or cover. My 6^th-great-grandfather William Cooper, who accompanied Daniel Boone to Kentucky and planted the first corn crop there, was a member. Original data found at http://www.mindspring.com/~marydrake/

The earliest depositions of Lumbee Indians (which were not taken until the late nineteenth century) make it clear that one important strain of founding families came to the swamplands of Robeson County from northeast North Carolina, just inland from the “Lost Colony.” Lumbee is an invented name, a back formation based on the place-names Lumberton and the Lumber River, the later not popularized until the rise of the lumber industry.

The oldest name is Lumberton, and I believe it was originally Lombard-town, though I have no way of proving this. The Jewish (and banking) district in metropolises like London and Philadelphia was invariably named Lombard Street because that is where “Lombard law” or mercantile law prevailed. “Lombard” and “Jewish merchant” were often synonymous. In medieval Oxford, Lombard-Hall was named after its Jewish proprietor (Anglia Judaica, by D’Blossiers Tovey, p. 8). The oldestBritish Jews were Lombards, going back to Roman times; they were joined by French-speaking Jews brought over by William the Conqueror. Thus we find a lot of overlap between Lumbee and Melungeon names. The common denominator is Jewish. The original appeal of these swamps to Jews lay in their rich, secret pig iron and coal beds. We find in the will of Israel Roberson preserved in the Wrightsboro Quaker records in 1773 an exact description of one of them (“…One hundred acres of land Lying on the head of the Beaver Dam in South Carolina where it is thought there is a Iron Mine”). Glass-making, a Jewish monopoly through the ages, was also practiced there, and the Gibsons of South Carolina became that state’s first millionaires. The county was later named for a Robertson family member—the same clan that founded Watauga and Nashville. But the mutual attraction of crypto-Jews to a safe haven where central authority dared not exert itself explains how several “Indian” cultural groups—Tuscarora, Coharie, Catawba, Saponi, Croatan, Ocaneechi, Cheraw (called the Juda Indians by the Spanish), Tudelo (a Langobardic/Visigothic hero’s name) and so forth--came together to form the “Lumbees.” No Indian languages were ever spoken by tribal members, and the Lumbee today have a difficult case to make to the U.S. Federal Government to become recognized. An example of a common Lumbee name that can be derived from a medieval Jewish Lombard family is Braveboy. A 1292 census of Paris lists numerous wealthy Jews from Brabant, a Flemish city with ties to the cloth, weaving and woolen industry of Lombardy (de Brabant, Brebois). Bradby, a family that supplied multiple chiefs to the Pamunkey Indians of Virginia, is probably a corruption (shown above is William Bradby, 1899).

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