Exploring Family History: The Audacious Meehan Legacy

PARDON OUR PROGRESS

This site is in the midst of renewal. You may notice sections shifting, pages unfinished, or stories still being woven together. Thank you for your patience as Those Audacious Meehans continues its work—preserving history, expanding community, and becoming the fuller vision it was always meant to be.

FOUNDATIONAL BLACK AMERICANS ARE QUINTESSENTIALLY AMERICAN

The story of the Meehan family. The intertwined communities they were part of began long before the United States took shape. Those who emerged from North America’s chattel slavery system were not simply displaced Africans; they became a new people formed in the Americas. Their lineages carried African, Indigenous, and European ancestry, woven together through survival, faith, cultural creativity, and generations of lived experience. Out of this history, a distinct population arose whose roots lie not in a single continent but in the complex human tapestry of the Western Hemisphere.

For centuries, society attempted to define these families through narrow racial labels or distant points of origin, often reducing their story to the trauma of what was taken. Yet the fuller truth is that their ancestors endured, built, migrated, resisted, intermarried, and established communities unlike any found elsewhere in the world. Their descendants are not merely “African Americans” in a broad diaspora-wide category, nor an extension of other nations’ histories. They are a people shaped by the specific realities of North American life, whose heritage is inseparable from the land they helped cultivate, defend, build, and sustain.

As a genealogist, not an anthropologist by training, but deeply engaged in the historical record, I have come to believe that the people we call Foundational Black Americans represent an anthropologically new population formed on American soil. Scholars such as Sidney Mintz & Richard Price (The Birth of African-American Culture) and Ira Berlin (Many Thousands Gone) describe how enslaved Africans and their descendants, through forced migration, cultural adaptation, and sustained community-building, produced distinct New World cultures that did not, and could not, exist in Africa or Europe. Foundational Black Americans belong to this category of ethnogenesis: a people created by the historical conditions of the Americas, with their own cultural continuities, kinship patterns, and lived identities.

This website honors that lineage. It affirms a simple truth: we are not an immigrant group; we are a new people ~~ Foundational Black Americans who are quintessentially American. The Meehan family’s story is one chapter in this larger narrative: a story of ancestors who crossed borders, survived upheaval, forged families of blended ancestry, and contributed to the making of a nation. As this site expands, it will continue to preserve family memories while situating them within the broader communities, migrations, and histories that shaped these extraordinary people.

Why this matters for the history presented on this website: The Meehans, friends, neighbors, and communities, are representative of a broader American landscape. Unfortunately, a landscape both shaped and erased by others. I often hear it said that Americans are all immigrants, a sentiment that recasts enslaved people as voluntary arrivals and erases the nation’s indigenous population altogether. On one hand, we cling to the idea of a society forged from many newcomers, united by democratic ideals. Yet we simultaneously overlook the very histories that reveal what it would take for democracy to truly live.

The stories on this website are few and simple within the larger sweep of American history, but each contributes to the growing effort by families to claim their rightful place in the nation’s narrative.

Hoe New Peoples Are Formed

Anthropologists call it ethnogenesis—the creation of a new people. A historical example is the Normans, who began as Viking settlers in France. Through intermarriage, cultural blending, and new ways of life, they became a distinct people within a few generations.

Foundational Black Americans followed a similar pattern. Africans, Indigenous peoples, and Europeans, brought together in North America under unique historical pressures, formed a new people on this soil. Their identity is shaped not by a single origin, but by the world their ancestors created here.

A STORY LARGER THAN ONE NAME

This website began as a tribute to the extraordinary lives of Charles and Hester Meehan — two of the many who endured, hoped, and built new lives across borders.

But their history is only one chapter in a much larger narrative.

Those Audacious Meehans is being expanded to tell the intertwined stories of Black families and communities who migrated from the U.S. to Canada and back again. They moved together — sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity — forming bonds of kinship, faith, and survival that stretched across generations and geographies.

You will find letters, photographs, community profiles, family histories, and reflections — all bearing witness to those who walked, sailed, homesteaded, and hoped together.

New material is being added regularly, so please visit again.

Catherine Meehan Blount

Site Creator and Administrator

DEDICATION

This site is dedicated to the families who walked side by side.

They journeyed together — from the Carolinas, the Mid-Atlantic region, and from the South — seeking refuge in Canada’s Queen’s Bush, building lives in Chatham and its surrounding areas, and later forging new communities in Michigan and in the unforgiving plains of Nebraska.

They crossed borders, carried children, and bore witness to one another’s joy and grief — not as isolated pioneers, but as a cloud of witnesses bound by kinship, faith, and necessity. Whether by foot, wagon, ship, or prayer, they moved as one — sometimes in body, always in spirit.

The people of DeWitty, Nebraska — gathered here in fellowship at a community picnic — represent the strength of many who endured by enduring together. Their names may differ, but their legacy is shared. In every land they settled, they left behind more than footprints — they left community.

We honor them here.

African Proverb

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

BUTTONS TAKE YOU TO A NEW PAGE

ORIGINS & LOVE STORIES FAMILY ARCHIVE GENEALOGY & DNA

The love of family and the admiration of friends is much more important than wealth and privilege.

Charles Kuralt

I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU

~~ LET ME KNOW YOU STOPPED BY

~~ COMMENT

~~ ASK A QUESTION

~~ SUGGEST AN ADDITION OR CHANGE

~~ PARTNER WITH ME

Those Audacious Meehans LLC

Direct email: thoseaudaciousmeehans@gmail.com

HOME

Those Audacious Meehans, LLC

All pictures used on this site are the property of Catherine Meehan Blount unless otherwise noted. Other images are used with permission.

Terms and Conditions

History of the Audacious Meehans

PARDON OUR PROGRESS

SEARCH THIS SITE