Friday, February 24, 2012

The Blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek: family mystery solved

Illustration of Martin Fugate & his family (© Walt Spitzmiller)

  Good Day Humboldt County!

Today, we’re taking a stroll down memory lane. Are you feeling blue?

Remember when a despondent Kermit the Frog sang "It's not easy being green"?

Well it isn’t easy being blue either. I mean literally blue-skinned. People with the condition have no connection to so-called Blue Bloods.” No, the blue-skinned people we’re talking about today all belong to one family!

News Snippet: 

“Benjamin "Benjy" Stacy so frightened maternity doctors with the color of his skin -- "as Blue as Lake Louise" -- that he was rushed just hours after his birth in 1975 to University of Kentucky Medical Center.

As a transfusion was being readied, the baby's grandmother suggested to doctors that he looked like the "blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek." Relatives described the boy's great-grandmother Luna Fugate as "blue all over," and "the bluest woman I ever saw."

In an unusual story that involves both genetics and geography, an entire family from isolated Appalachia was tinged blue. Their ancestral line began six generations earlier with a French orphan, Martin Fugate, who settled in Eastern Kentucky.”  (Read the rest of the story here.)

Time for me to walk on down the road…

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