Yeah, I know about the Casket Girls and those who came later. I'm talking about the descendants of the earliest settlers.

My ancestor, Don Juan Peralta, came to the West in the mid 1700's. My family says he stopped first in Puerto Rico, where he got married. Then he and his wife proceeded to Louisiana, where he served as an official during the interim Spanish government. They never said much about who he married in Puerto Rico, but I had some ideas because many of us look like we have some Native mixture to this day. Then I got a DNA test, which confirmed this. There's also a touch of West Central African, though that doesn't show as much. Getting this DNA report was like finding missing pieces of myself.

For a while, the so-called white Creoles proudly identified as Creole. It was kind of like having ancestors who came on the Mayflower. But then, during the Great Depression, they dropped this moniker. It suggested mixed heritage, and government programs at the time mostly helped white people. Elvis Presley's family also got some of these benefits, even though they most likely have some Melungeon roots. Whiteness is a commodity like any other.